Peace and Plenty
Earlier in the year I visited a farm in California that grows one of the priciest crops on the planet: saffron, that beguiling ingredient that stains dishes a sunset orange and famously adds haunting flavor to aioli and less famously but equally deliciously to ice cream and cocktails. Growing saffron is a painstaking process: all invisible promise as the bulblike corms buried in spring turn to flowers in the fall, and for a brief window offer up crimson stigmas that, when dried, go for thousands of dollars a pound. The name of the farm is as lovely as what it yields. It’s called Peace & Plenty, a state of being we could all cultivate if we put our minds to it. (You can read all about it on page 56.)…
