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Nasturtium Folds
Flavor the butter with nasturtium leaves and blossoms, and with it spread a thin slice of moist bread, which is longer one way than the other.
Press fresh nasturtium leaves and blossoms upon the butter and fold one half over the other.
A fold sandwich rather than a stacked one: a single thin slice of soft bread, buttered, filled, and doubled over. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the bread being fresh enough to bend without cracking.
- "Moist bread" is the hingeIt most likely means bread fresh enough to fold rather than damp bread. Use a soft, fine-crumbed sandwich loaf, as fresh as you can slice thinly, cut about 1/4 inch thick; firm or drying bread will split along the fold. Chilling the loaf briefly makes thin, even slices easier to cut.
- Making the nasturtium butterCream 4 oz butter until soft, work in about 2 tablespoons finely chopped nasturtium leaves and a few shredded petals, and let it stand an hour so the peppery flavor moves into the fat. A pinch of salt helps; the leaves are hot and mustardy rather than floral.
- Cut the slices longThe recipe asks only for a slice longer one way than the other, so that folding gives a neat oblong or square. Cutting lengthwise down a Pullman loaf gives an elongated shape directly; otherwise trim standard slices and remove crusts.
- Butter to the edgesThe butter is both flavoring and glue. Spread it right out to the margins so the folded halves stay shut, and press the fold gently rather than creasing it hard.
- Sourcing the flowersNasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) are edible in leaf, flower and seed pod, but use only plants you know have not been sprayed. Ornamental plants from florists and garden centres may have been treated with systemic insecticides and should not be assumed safe to eat.
- Prep the leavesChoose small young leaves, which are milder; large ones are aggressively hot. Rinse, dry thoroughly, and check the undersides for aphids, which favor nasturtiums.
- Yield and holdingA slice makes one fold; count two or three per person for a tea table. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them under a barely damp cloth in the refrigerator, or the bread edges harden and the petals wilt to nothing.
Nasturtiums earned their place in the Anglo-American kitchen garden long before they reached the sandwich plate: the seed pods were pickled as a domestic substitute for capers, and the peppery leaves went into salads throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The plant's older English name, Indian cress, points to its South American origin and to the mustard-oil sharpness it shares with true cress. This fold belongs to the wave of afternoon-tea sandwiches that fills late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery books, where the aim was something small, cool, and decorative to hand round with tea rather than anything filling. Compound butters do most of the work in that genre, and a book of salads, sandwiches, and chafing-dish dishes is exactly where such a recipe would land -- light cookery for the hostess, requiring no range and no carving.