Saffron Golden Milk

Saffron cannot reproduce itself. Crocus sativus is sterile and sets no seed. Every saffron plant alive is a clone, grown from a corm split off an older plant, which means every saffron field in the world was started by a person carrying corms from a field that already existed. The plant has no other way to travel.

That is why saffron traces the Silk Road so exactly. It went outward from Persia by hand, a few bulbs at a time, into Kashmir, Anatolia and Andalusia. It was carried, on purpose, by people who had decided it was worth the weight.

The harvest never got easier. Each flower opens for a morning and holds three crimson threads. They are taken out by hand, and it takes one hundred and fifty flowers to make a single gram. Like the roses in the valley to the north, the flowers are picked at first light, before the heat of the day gets into them.

In the Canon of Medicine, finished around 1025, Ibn Sina placed saffron among the mufarrihat -- the gladdeners of the heart. That was a real category in that tradition, and a narrow one. Not a painkiller, not a purge, not something for a specific organ. A class of medicine whose stated purpose was to lift a person's spirit.

Saffron has withstood over 100 clinical trials investigating the safety, side effects and efficacy and showing across the board to support mood and emotional wellbeing -- which is to say the claim Ibn Sina made a thousand years ago has been measured, in the terms modern medicine uses, and it held. Very few old remedies survive that.

The supporting adaptogenic ingredients of the elixir trace the same silk road. Tremella from China, cordyceps from Tibet, shatavari and ashwagandha from India, black seed from Arabia, cinnamon from Ceylon, damask rose from the Valley of the Roses in the Atlas.