Secrets of Saffron CL

Saffron is, in my opinion, one of the greatest flavoring agents in the world. I'm partial to it in baked goods and dairy products, and have developed my own recipe for saffron ice cream which is so addictive that I don't dare make it often. The finest (and incidentally the most expensive) wine I ever drank had a distinct saffron note to it which made the experience of drinking supremely heady. Saffron is mysterious to most people, even experienced cooks, and for many an acquired taste.Pat Willard's book, though it does offer a number of saffron-rich recipes, is primarily a history of the spice and its travels. But even more compelling is the personal content, the stories of Willard's own involvement with saffron which range from amusing (her red silk bodice and almost-but-not-quite association with the SCA) to poignant (her saffron-rich creme brulee pie, created while trying to hold off the worst of the grief over her mother's death.) Willard has a gift for personalizing her work, and even though some of what she writes has an almost confessional quality, her stories are never less than graceful.The recipes she includes are often quite old, and can be difficult to follow for modern cooks, but there are also more contemporary recipes which will whet your appetite for saffron. If reading about food is as pleasurable for you as cooking and eating, then this book will be a good addition to your shelves.

Pat Willard has described a passion, in _Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World's Most Seductive Spice_ (Beacon Press). It is a three-fold work: the history of the spice; Willard's personal history with it (a foundation for pleasing essays from a sensuous woman); and assorted recipes. I have not had enough saffron to consider myself a fan, and I have not tried the given recipes for saffron-soaked custard, pork, lobster, or paella, but I can tell you they sound good, and that Willard has written two previous well-regarded story-and-recipe books on pie and on broths. Cooks are probably in good hands.It is enormous fun, with Willard as a laughing guide, to see world history as saffron history. She speculates that the makers of Persian carpets found saffron a useful yellow dye and its smell from the vats turned it into a perfume, and then the cooks tried it. The Egyptians used it as perfume, but especially liked the bright yellow for the clot in which to wind their dead. Alexander the Great had plenty of chances to soak up the cultures of his conquests, and liked saffron baths and tea and rice, and before dinner he had wine with saffron mixed into it. Saffron, unlike other spices, could be grown in England, and it still was costly, so it made the fortunes of such towns as Walden, which became Saffron Walden. It was only when new discoveries like capers, sugar cane, and vanilla came from the new world, and banquets were pared from forty dishes to a puritanical ten or so, that saffron began to wane. The ounces of saffron that could be harvested from acres of crocuses eventually became tons of potatoes and corn, crops that were dependable and less fussy.Willard's history is good, but her personal stories are the best writing in the book. Her bittersweet recounting of going to the Saffron Festival in Spain, where Saffron isn't grown in any quantity anymore, is fine travel writing, and her introduction to the spice by a mysterious stranger who came to call on her has the bittersweet extended into eroticism. She has a rich memory of what happened after her mother's death: "Of all the things that go through your mind when you watch death approach, thinking of food may seem the most absurd, maybe even a little obscene. And yet it is what the living almost always turn to... the living's way of breaking away, the body understanding before the mind fully does what is the necessary and correct order demanded in the wider world." The way Willard writes about the subsequent effect of the saffron crème brûlée pie (recipe, of course, included here) would have made her mother proud. Willard can tell us also of her own successful growing and harvesting of saffron, in Brooklyn. This is a book of many delights, a gathering of all sorts of saffron stories and histories, tasty, pungent, and wonderfully personal.