What Does Prestige Taste Like? The Divorce of Saffron from Its Cultural Context
James O’Donnell
Abstract: This paper explores the impact of divorcing an ingredient from its cultural context. It examines the history of saffron’s industrialization, how perception of the spice has shifted over time, and why to white American cooks it represents not an ingredient to cook with but a feeling of wealth, indulgence and decadence. As farmers, our decision to grow saffron in New York for chefs and restaurants came from a place of wonder, curiosity, and respect for the dignity of agriculture. We soon realized that to take an ingredient from the ecologies, culture and cuisine that shaped it is to treat it in a vacuum. As our pantries, cuisines and spice supply chains become more globally influenced, it’s important to consider the implications of adopting an ingredient while ignoring its culture.
Saffron flowers dread the rain. It was thus out of necessity that my partner and I, weary and drenched, went back to our field to reattach the protective cover over the blooms. For 290 millennia, the flowers have grown in arid climates, yet they patiently flourished on our farm in upstate New York. Late October is saffron’s peak blooming season. Out of frozen soil resiliently comes a pale white stem, which slowly reveals a tightly wound violet bud. Within a night the flower then opens, presenting three ruby red stigmas like a gift, which must be meticulously separated from the flower itself by hand, then carefully dried and packed. Our saffron, both the edible flowers and stigmas, were destined for elite kitchens across New York City, where we watched decorated chefs touch and taste the gossamer petals with the sincere wonder of a child. But, most of them had absolutely no idea what to use it for. One celebrated chef took a whole flower and dunked it in a teacup of hot water. We all stood around, looking at it, the colour of the water unchanging and without aroma, feeling underwhelmed. Others experimented with preserving it: drying, fermenting, candying. Others went about things the traditional way, drying just the red stigmas and using as a spice. Meanwhile, the flowers kept blooming, and we kept harvesting, unsure of what sort of culinary delights they would end up in. Nonetheless, every drop off of flowers was welcomed with awe, photos and a feeling of decadence. We would ask the crew: do you know what you’re using them for yet? Responses were mixed, but unsure. After going door to door with our flowers, to some of the top restaurants, led by mostly white chefs, we would receive the same response: magical, beautiful, wonderful…but how do we cook with them?
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Some of the results were delicious. More often though, they were confusing. We thought we were taking on an innovative agricultural experiment: a prestigious, globetrotting ingredient could be grown right on our farm. What we really did was divorce an ingredient from the practices, people, and knowledge that created it, and expected it to stand alone. What biases led us to bring this ingredient to chefs with no cultural ties to the spice, not to chefs with the tools to actually use it? What led us to grow it in the first place, when it’s never been a part of either of our culinary upbringings? Where did we go wrong? Journalist Navneet Alang writes about our modern era of the global pantry, ‘when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labelled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst’.1 Examples of this global pantry include ingredients like turmeric, tahini and gochujang, which are increasingly placed ad-hoc in recipes from more white- centred cuisines. They’ve become steadily incorporated into mainstream dishes, but only in a slow, precise pace. To the cooks who feel a cultural tie to these ingredients, it can feel as if they are taboo until the white-led media broadcasts that they’re ‘safe’ to cook with. Alang explains that the inherent problem is not about who can or cannot use a given ingredient. Instead, the more pressing question is, ‘whether, say, a person of color could have also made a stew featuring chickpeas and turmeric go viral. Aren’t both the perceived novelty and the recipe’s ‘virality’ tied to the whiteness of its creator?’ 291 For saffron, there seem to be two cultural realities. One surrounds the areas where it is grown: northeastern Iran, Herat province in Afghanistan, the Abruzzo region of Italy, Kashmir. These regions have vastly different methods of growing, harvesting, dishes and recipes, but still, the changing of the seasons can be mapped to the saffron fields. The spice finds its way into regional cuisine, cultural memory, iconography, livelihoods. White American home cooks live in the second reality, one where saffron is commodified, exported, removed from its agricultural roots, its recipes, farmers and cooks, and bottled anonymously on the shelf with a high price tag. What’s left is just a feeling, one of luxury, decadence, and fanciness. We can’t exactly pinpoint where this feeling comes from or what it tastes like, but there is a cachet. It hinges on inequality and exoticism. An American home cook perusing recipes online to use their saffron for will find little about the flavor itself. Instead, the food media uses words like elegance, polish, elevate, precious, luxurious, or elusive. In this reality, saffron feels almost secondary to the act of eating, but instead acts as an accessory, confirming a feeling of superiority and wealth. This second reality is what we felt when we stood in those kitchens with those chefs; we felt underwhelmed because we clung to the prestige of saffron without any greater cultural association to it. We didn’t do the work of bringing a culinary background to understanding the spice, but we didn’t need to: it was performative. But when it’s merely performative, it isn’t delicious.
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The spice trade has juggled these two realities pretty well. It’s created an $880 million industry off of a product that many white consumers have little idea what to do with, but who sense its elegance and purchase accordingly.2 How did we get here? How has the industrial spice trade divorced saffron from its cultural context, and what are the consequences? To set the scene, we must recall the intentions of the spice trade to begin with. Although spices have been consumed and traded since 6000 BC, the sale of spices in the 15th and 16th centuries drove unprecedented wealth to traders (though not to the growing regions that actually grew them). The fact that this era occurred right at the transition period in Europe between feudalism and capitalism comes as no coincidence. Clifford A. Wright explains. Although the ancient Greeks, Romans, Indians and Arabs had actively traded spices, it was not until the slow dissolution of feudal structures in western Europe in the late Middle Ages and the rise of a bourgeoisie associated with the creation and accumulation of capital in certain city-states that spices took on a far more significant role than simple culinary use would suggest.3 He goes on to say that cookbooks for the elite required exorbitant amounts of spices, far beyond what would seem to be necessary from the perspective of flavour. Wright again: Wealthy Europeans consumed spices in such extraordinary quantities during these centuries that the demand drove up prices. Yet it remains unclear how 292 the spices were used. Although enormous amounts of spices featured in cooking, the volume of the trade was so great as to suggest that they may also have been hoarded like gold.4 It is much more likely, then, that spices carried currency, saffron included. The ‘budding capitalists’ that Wright refers to took enormous risks, establishing complex supply chains and leveraging colonial power to make riches as middlemen. Indeed, much of the violent colonial exploration by European powers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century was done in direct attempts to control the lucrative spice trade. Seventy years after Vasco de Gama sailed to India in 1497, pepper imports tripled from 2 million to 6 million pounds. Little has changed in the spice trade today. Profits are centred around the traders, not farmers. Producers have few choices of who to sell their product to and little equity in the supply chain, leading to poor trade conditions and stagnant wages. The commodity spice trade is built on stale product, poor conditions, and inequality. As the spice trade has commodified saffron, the original uses and applications of the spice are obscured to unfamiliar consumers. In the literature around saffron’s history there is remarkably little about cooking. Thought to have originally been domesticated in Crete, author Jo Day describes, in great detail, the use of saffron as a motif in clay tablets, jars, and paintings in Crete dating back to 3,000 B.C. which showcased saffron being used to heal
Draft Version: Not for Distribution or Citation The Divorce of Saffron from Its Cultural Context wounds.5 Researchers say that saffron was also used as pigment throughout the Persian Empire. The spice finds its way into myth, such as the Hellenic story of Crocus and Smilax. Medicinal uses varied: the spice would be toasted, ground, or steeped, and applied in a variety of different mediums to treat medical issues from urinary tract to gastrointestinal pains. The petals and stamens were used in dyeing fabrics as well, and there are claims that wealthy Romans used the spice in baths, ceremonies, wines, potpourri, and religious offerings. The spice was blended into skin products and perfumes, as well as teas. While it appears in historical recipes, it seems there were far broader uses than other cooking.6 How has the saffron industry adapted to an American market less reliant on myth, traditional medicine and ceremony? Lior Sercarz is an Israeli chef, spice blender, and the founder of La Boite, a spice company based in New York city, selling spices to elite chefs and home cooks. He admits to not growing up around the spice, and being generally confused at the reverence some hold for it. He explains, ‘I use a bit at home. Floral, savory, slightly piney. Is it worth the cost? I’m not sure.’ Cooking with saffron is an art in subtlety and patience: the spice requires infusions and time; it is not a potent additive that can be easily thrown into an existing dish. But for many cooks, the draw is not deliciousness, but prestige. Lior openly confirms, ‘It’s like caviar, or foie gras. If someone’s paying for it, I love it.’ If saffron has been divorced from its uses in medicine, perfume, and dyeing fabrics, it’s no wonder why American home cooks have trouble understanding the spice. But 293 what about the chefs and cuisines that do hold it as a gastronomic icon? Who steward the ingredient to its full potential? For this, turn to Persian cuisine: take gheymeh nesar, where lamb shoulder is slowly braised with pistachios and almonds in a saffron broth, or shole zard, a floral pudding of starchy rice simmered with saffron and rosewater. Or, the iconic tah-dig, a rice dish where the bottom layer is caramelized and browned, while the top is beautifully steamed with the aroma of saffron. In many of these dishes, the use of saffron is part flavour, part colour, part celebration. As the industry grows, there are many attempts to automate the task of separating stigmas from flowers. I spoke to engineering students from the University of Pennsylvania who spent a year researching, designing and engineering a machine to automate the separation of saffron stigmas from their flowers. This physically demanding task represents a significant amount of the workforce in growing regions. They landed on the topic after considering a number of other agricultural automation projects, from harvesting table grapes to using drones to count the number of apples in an orchard. The team successfully built a prototype of a machine that could take in saffron flowers, and spit out just the stigmas, all while beating the cost of human labour by operating at less than $5100 per acre. I asked the team member I spoke to if he ever cooked with saffron, to which he said no. None of the team members had any agricultural experience, but thought there was a huge
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automation opportunity given the high price of saffron. I asked hypothetically, how do you think American cuisine would change if we had access to more affordable saffron, given that it’s less familiar to many home cooks? They weren’t sure, but were certain it would transform the saffron economy. Their goal was to have saffron grown domestically, in the United States, just like my partner and I were doing. Except it would be larger, and more profitable, and compete with the saffron coming in from Iran. Through the modern lenses of agribusiness, neoliberalism and capitalism, the group’s logic is sound. If there’s demand for something, it follows to grow it where it’s cheapest, and sell it where it is most valued. I didn’t have a good reason for why they were wrong, except I remembered standing in the kitchen, with chefs who had no cultural knowledge, understanding or relation to the spice, wondering what to do with it. Is a cheaper ingredient a win if consumers have no cuisine that supports it? How can we honour the cultural transmission that happens through cooking if we continue to divorce ingredients from their origins? What sort of jumbled, confused global cuisine is industrial agriculture bringing us towards? I harken back to my partner and I’s decision to grow saffron in the first place. It somewhat embodies the same complexities of the global pantry. Where did our desire come from? It certainly was not from a place of honouring a shared cultural heritage. It did, though, come from a place of curiosity, of loving food, of respecting the honour and dignity in agriculture, but sometimes that is not enough. Why did we market the product to mostly white chefs who we had worked with in the past? Why did we think culinary magic would happen when 294 the participants had little overlap with the cultural identity of the ingredient? On the topic of cooking with ingredients outside one’s culture, writer Priya Krishna explains, ‘I love that people’s pantries are getting more global, but I do hope that when people cook with them, they take the time to educate themselves about the origin of these ingredients, rather than treating them as ingredients in a vacuum, divorced of their context.’ 7 There is much to lose by treating these ingredients in a vacuum. We have work to do in stepping aside, honouring the agricultural roots, power struggles, and wisdom behind the ingredients we grow and cook with. This work will make us better cooks and farmers, but more importantly preserve the sovereignty of regional cuisine.
Notes 1. Navneet Alang, ‘Alison Roman, Bon Appetit, and the Global Pantry’, Eater 20 May 2020
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