Saffron Festival
Whilst in Spain, we also went to a small country town called Consuegra, just an hour’s drive from Toledo, where they hold an annual Saffron Festival. Saffron is a lovely little purple crocus, which blooms in the autumn for just a couple of weeks. During these weeks, the flowers are picked by hand (back-breaking work!), then the three precious deep red stigmas are removed by hand from the centre of the flowers. As you can imagine, it’s very desirable to have someone with deft fingers to remove the stigmas as quickly and efficiently as possible, so at the Festival, people from several surrounding villages came to compete in saffron-picking races. Not only speed, but also accuracy in picking only the stigmas and not the bright yellow stamens, was judged, and competitors lost a point for each stigma left behind or each stamen picked in error. On the second day, there was a cooking competition in the carpark beside the church. Once again, groups from surrounding villages took part, each group of five or six people setting up little fires and pots, to make traditional local fare, preferably using saffron. Despite the language problems, we found that if we stood looking interested and sufficiently hungry, people would proffer a hunk of bread with which we were invited to scoop up a taste of what was cooking. Heavily salted and rich in garlic, paprika and olive oil, they proved to be excellent tapas preceding a memorable lunch shared from the same pot with over a thousand locals