I’m Just Wild About Saffron
In The Beginning
Motor City is my background. A grandfather and his eldest son and two of my uncle’s sons work in the auto industry in and around Detroit. They each paid their bills and raised their families but none had cash hiding in the couch cushions. I ate with my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins often as a kid. We never wanted for food and the cooking was a mix of Polish and German, my side, and Portuguese, my aunt’s side. Pressures of assimilation had removed most of the family cultural culinary signatures but even if it had not, saffron was not an ingredient on the radar of any of my ancestors.
Saffron connotes a level of prosperity and entitlement we never reached. No doubt our saffron embargo was much impacted by the ignorance of the spice. When an ingredient is expensive, the learning curve is steep and ruin is expensive. Better to go without.