Saffron jar 0.5 g

It is thanks to the Arabs that the crocus, a flower loved by the Greeks and Romans and then forgotten in the age of the barbarian invasions, bloomed again with its many-coloured cups in the heart of Sicily. In Greek “kròke” means thread, and it is precisely the red-orange threads (technically the stigmas) that have made the flower precious since ancient Egypt: as a natural dye for fabrics, a hair colour, a remedy, a wedding gift and even an ingredient in love potions. One tradition holds that Proserpina (Kore to the Greeks) was carried off by Hades (the Romans’ Pluto) on the shores of Lake Pergusa while she was picking crocus flowers, and in his “Naturalis Historia” Pliny praises the qualities of Sicilian crocus flowers.

The Arabs called it za’farân, from the Middle Persian zarparān, “golden-winged”. Saffron has always been by far the most expensive of spices: producing one kilo of threads means two months of work to pick at least 150,000 flowers by hand and remove 450,000 threads.