The Right Chemistry: An encounter with saffron leads down a memorable path

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I can actually date my first encounter with saffron. It was in February 2005. I had read about an avant-garde art project that had just been unveiled in New York’s Central Park that transformed miles of paths into “flapping saffron-coloured rivers.” Christo, the Bulgarian artist who had already gained fame by wrapping Berlin’s Reichstag in fabric and surrounding islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with floating pink sheets of polypropylene, had now launched an even more ambitious venture. Hundreds of workers set up some 7,500 “gates” along the park’s 23 miles of walkways with saffron-coloured nylon fabric hanging from each gate.

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Curiously, what caught my eye was “saffron,” a term with which I was not familiar. However, I had a great interest in the chemistry of dyes, so here was a new path I had to explore. As is so often the case, when you start digging into a subject, you uncover tunnels galore, some with treasures at the end. In this case, that treasure was saffron, the most expensive spice in the world.

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Actually, it’s more than a spice. For over 3,000 years, saffron has been used as a fragrance, a dye, and a medicine, as well as a seasoning. It consists of the dried stigmas of the Crocus sativus flower, the thread-like structures that are part of the female reproductive system of a flower, but in this case, they are useless for reproduction. Crocus sativus is sterile and cannot reproduce sexually. The bulb from which the flower grows, known as a “corm,” reproduces in the ground “vegetatively” until there is no more room for new bulbs to form, and then the flowers die. The only reason that saffron still exists today is because of the human hand. The corms are collected from the ground and are individually replanted in a field of fertilized, freshly plowed soil. Once the flowers bloom, the stigma are harvested by hand, a very labourious procedure, and then dried. About 150,000 flowers are needed to yield a kilo of high-quality stigma that sells for around $20,000.

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Why would anybody want to spend that kind of money on a spice? Well, the cost is a little misleading because only a few strands are needed to impart taste and colour to a dish. The colour certainly adds eye appeal, and the somewhat bitter taste is unique. Alpha-crocin, a compound related to the carotenes found in carrots, is responsible for the yellow colour, and saffron’s characteristic flavour derives from picrocrocin, which is also responsible for the smell of the spice. During the drying process, some of the picrocrocin breaks down and releases safranal, saffron’s delightful fragrance. While alpha-crocin, picrocrocin and safranal are the major compounds that characterize saffron, over 150 other components have been isolated.

Aside from its use as a food flavouring and a dye, as in the robes of Buddhist monks, saffron has a history of use as a medicine. It has been claimed to act as a sexual stimulant, a sedative, an abortive agent, an antidepressant and a pain reliever. Saffron was popular at Roman orgies because of the belief that it was an impediment to drunkenness. More recently, based on its antioxidant properties, as determined in laboratory studies, saffron has developed a reputation as an anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and cardio-protective substance. None of these uses are supported by proper clinical trials.

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Saffron’s profitability has often invited adulteration by unscrupulous merchants. Historically, they’ve extended saffron with cheaper spices such as turmeric, or used stigmas from other flowers. Henry VIII was so fond of saffron at his dining table that he forbade the spice to be used as a dye, fearing a shortage. Nuremberg, Germany, took more drastic measures. “Saffron inspectors” were authorized to burn or bury alive anyone who adulterated saffron.

Unfortunately, the saffron scam continues to this day, mostly using stigmas from flowers like marigold, artificially dyed yellow. The counterfeiters involved in these activities must be very thankful that we no longer execute people for saffron tampering. Today, you just go to jail, as two men in India did for passing dyed corn silk off as saffron. Other fakes can be identified with the use of spectrophotometry, infrared spectroscopy or gas chromatography. That’s a good thing. If you are going to spend a fortune on saffron, you at least want to be sure that your paella is flavoured and coloured with the same stuff that Cleopatra added to her bath as a seductive essence to increase the pleasure of making love.

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Once I had educated myself about saffron, Christo’s mega art project intrigued me even more. Knowing the cost of the stigma, I wondered how the production of 100,000 square metres of saffron-coloured nylon fabric was possible. As it turns out, it wasn’t. The fabric wasn’t dyed with saffron, the term was only used to describe the colour, adding more allure to the project, which turned out to be a huge success and attracted thousands of tourists. One hotel even served a “saffron-seasoned” lunch in hour of “The Gates,” as the artwork came to be called. Hopefully they used authentic saffron. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor at the time, was so pleased with Christo’s work that he compared it to the Sistine Chapel as an example of great art. Michelangelo’s masterpiece is still there to enthral visitors, but The Gates were dismantled after two weeks. Christo did not claim that the project, which was totally financed by himself and his wife, had any “inner meaning.” He maintained that “it has no purpose, provides no symbol.”

But for me it did provide something: A stimulus to look into the fascinating world of saffron. And now, I have gone past just looking. I have tasted. A colleague gifted me with an authentic sample of saffron from Iran, the world’s largest producer. It adds life to rice and makes tea smell and taste delightful, especially when ground with a mortar and pestle. Stimulated by all this, I have gone one eccentric step further: I placed a bid on eBay for a small swatch of fabric from The Gates.

joe.schwarcz@mcgill.ca

Joe Schwarcz (joe.schwarcz@mcgill.ca) is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m.

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