{"id":2628,"date":"2021-11-07T14:45:13","date_gmt":"2021-11-07T14:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2628"},"modified":"2021-11-07T20:14:16","modified_gmt":"2021-11-07T20:14:16","slug":"the-alchemical-saffron-harvest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=2628","title":{"rendered":"The Alchemical Saffron Harvest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Years ago I started imagining a saffron harvest, conjuring up the process of hundreds of humans, with their hands, turning fields of flowers into an essence, a spice, dried stigma so concentrated it\u2019s almost like a drug. Time passed.  As I let it float, it took on disorienting dimensions.  I imagined it as a Dionysian foray into color, or a metaphoric turning of one matter \u2014 flower \u2014 into another \u2014 a spice.  Or one color \u2014 violet \u2014 into another \u2014 deeply inbued red-yellow. An ever-expanding chain of one sense – color – becoming another \u2014 scent \u2014 and another \u2014 flavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What luck to find myself in Consuegra, a small town in La Mancha, Spain, for the celebration of this year\u2019s saffron harvest.\u00a0 Behind every foray into color there is a ground, real people, a story. It rained. We watched children compete in saffron plucking contests, as if a spelling bee or lego competition.\u00a0 Elder women peered over shoulders of the children \u2014 the spectacled, the quick, the chubby \u2014 until the first girl jumped up, having separated the pale violet petals of the autumn crocus, picked that morning, into a pile of zingy red threads.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a marvel of patience! How arresting to see the old women leaning with their milk-blue eyes full of concentration as they extracting the silky threads.\u00a0 Color became the mode of transport of tradition across time, like an echo, a talking drum.\u00a0 (Hillsides of windmills mark the travels of Cervantes and Don Quixote in La Mancha.) That evening, threads are toasted in homes over sieves until a cooler darker brown emerges.\u00a0 Alchemy! Red gold. It makes the head spin, inside a wave of scent, color and flavor. 200,000 flowers for a kilo of the stuff. Disruption of the senses! \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Years ago I started imagining a saffron harvest, conjuring up the process of hundreds of humans, with their hands, turning fields of flowers into an essence, a spice, dried stigma so concentrated it\u2019s almost like a drug. Time passed.  As … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1174,1172,1173],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consuegra","tag-saffron","tag-saffron-harvest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-Go","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2642,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions\/2642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}