TED-Ed
Уровень B1· 407 слов
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[music] >> Spices are often far pricier proportionately than the foods they flavor, [music] but one's cost has long topped them all.
Saffron's [music] red threads regularly run at rates over $600 an ounce. So, why is this so-called red gold so expensive?
Spices come from [music] different plant parts. Saffron is the only one made of flower stigmas. They're plucked from a flowering plant called a crocus.
species [music] dot countrysides across Eurasia and North Africa, and it appears that humans began harvesting wild crocuses quite a way back.
Ancient cave paintings in what's now [music] Iraq derived colors from crocus pigments. However, this paint was probably created with a different [music] type of crocus because it's thought that the saffron crocus developed [music] relatively recently when a single wild crocus produced a seed >> [music]
>> carrying an extra set of chromosomes. This mutation resulted in a flower with especially [music] long stigmas that packed high concentrations of three compounds of interest: crocin, [music] which lends saffron its vibrant hue and makes an effective dye, picrocrocin, [music] which gives saffron its characteristic
taste, and saffronal, which imparts its hay-like aroma. The plant's added chromosomes also made it sterile, so it could have simply come and gone from the face of the Earth pretty quickly. But scientists think that people long ago recognized this unique crocus qualities.
And while it couldn't reproduce sexually [music] by seed, it could spread through its corm, an underground stem-like plant organ that can asexually [music] generate new growth.
It seems people began propagating it themselves, separating and cultivating new corm growths. Today's commercial saffron comes from crocuses that are all functionally twins from this single clonal line. Scientists think the original plant first emerged in southern [music] Greece. Exactly when is unclear, but over 3,500
year-old Greek frescos depict women harvesting the spice. And saffron fields in modern-day Iran seem to trace back at [music] least 3,000 years.
Before long, ancient Persian people were stirring the spice into foods, freshening up with saffron-infused perfume, and draping [music] themselves in saffron-tinged fabrics.
