The Red Gold Crocus: Mediaeval Saffron Recipe Notebook

One hundred and fifty thousand flowers. That’s what it takes to harvest a single kilo of this stuff. Crocus sativus. You have to pluck the three crimson stigmas from the lilac petals by hand, on the exact day the flower opens. Absolute madness. The mediaeval world lost its collective mind over it. It’s actually a sterile triploid mutant of Crocus cartwrightianus. It can't even reproduce without human intervention, yet it practically conquered the global economy. I track humanity's bizarre enslavement to this sterile little corm in my notebook "Botanist" (https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/99f1e23a-1ae5-4c36-b1fb-a897422451eb), because frankly, it’s a brilliant evolutionary scam. The plant tricked us into propagating it by tasting like metallic honey and fresh hay. They put it in everything back then. Puddings. Heavy meat stews. Pope Clement VI demanded candied fruits of many colours for the eighth course of his coronation feast, and you couldn't get that brilliant, blinding yellow without saffron. The German herbalists issued a very serious warning that if you mixed saffron with wine, it would strengthen the heart to such a dangerous degree that you might literally laugh yourself to death. I rather like that. What a way to go. The cover of this binder shows the plant properly. Grassy leaves springing up from the dirt. The swollen underground corm. The delicate, drooping purple perianth. And those three blood-red threads hanging out like a dare. Keep your most fiercely guarded recipes in here. Saffron was, and still is, the most counterfeited spice on earth. They used to burn people at the stake in the Middle Ages just for adulterating it with cheap safflower. Write down your heavy almond-milk desserts, your rich risottos, your exorbitant kitchen experiments. The paper is heavy enough to take a spill of olive oil or a smudge of yellow paste. Just don't leave it lying open when company comes over.