Saffron
Saffron is used in many Spanish recipes, including paella and Fabada Asturiana, and in many Indian recipes. In herbal medicine, saffron is used for its eupeptic, carminative, and emmenagogic properties.
Written records show that saffron has been used medicinally in the treatment of 90 illnesses for over four millenia. In fact, according to recent research based on frescoes on the Greek island of Thera in the Aegean, saffron may have been used as a medicine in the 15th century BC. The word "saffron" comes from the Arabic word assfar, which means yellow.
Saffron has also been used as a fabric dye. Traditionally, clothes colored by this particularly luminous dye were worn by the noble classes, giving the plant a ritualized caste significance.
Spain and India are major producers of saffron. Saffron owes its fantastic price to the difficulty of extracting the stamens of the crocus individually by hand and how many it takes to make up a given weight, because they are so small. To make a pound of saffron requires approximately 25,000 stamens; each crocus contributes three.
In England during the 15th - 18th centuries, saffron was grown extensively in parts of Cambridgeshire and Essex. The Essex town of Saffron Walden got its name from being a market center for the saffron trade.
Saffron is, at least superficially, the subject of Donovan's song "Mellow yellow".