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Scented Sandwiches
Scented sandwiches, such as clover, nasturtium, rose and violet, are made by covering both the bread and butter with the leaves or flowers, allowing them to remain over night. Simply serve the bread and butter sandwiches. To make them proceed as follows: Trim the crusts from a loaf of bread, put it into a large soup tureen in a bed of clover (or any highly scented flower); wrap the butter in a piece of cheesecloth and put it also in a tureen; cover with clover. Next day the butter and bread will be filled with the flavor and odor of clover.
This is less a recipe than a technique: aromatic transfer from flowers into fat and starch, with nothing but time and a closed vessel. It works, but only if the flowers are clean, dry and safe to keep near food.
- The hingeNothing is cooked and nothing is chopped in — the flowers only perfume the bread and butter and are then discarded. The original relies on a covered vessel and enough blossom to surround both parcels completely; the better the lid seals, the stronger the transfer.
- The tureenA soup tureen is a large lidded vessel, which is what the method needs. Any deep bowl or storage container with a tight lid does the same job; a glass jar or a plastic food box works better because it seals.
- Flowers to useRed clover, nasturtium, rose petals and violets are all edible and unproblematic in contact with food. Avoid florist and garden-centre flowers, which are routinely treated with systemic pesticides, and avoid anything picked at a roadside.
- Prepare the blossomsPick in dry weather, shake out insects, and do not wash unless necessary — wet petals will dampen the crumb and can spoil against the butter. Use freshly opened flowers; the scent falls off as they wilt.
- Butter and breadUse unsalted butter in a solid block, wrapped in a double layer of cheesecloth so no petals stick to the surface. A close-crumbed white loaf, a day old, takes the scent best and slices thin without tearing; open airy sourdough dries out instead.
- Where to leave itThe original gives no storage place, only "over night." A cool room overnight is fine for butter in a sealed container; the refrigerator slows the transfer considerably, so if you use it, allow a full day and bring the butter back to spreading temperature before slicing.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the loaf and how thin you slice; count on a couple of dozen thin finger sandwiches from an average trimmed loaf. Butter the slices thinly, press together, cut into fingers or triangles, and serve the same afternoon — the perfume is fugitive and fades quickly.
Scented sandwiches belong to the elaborate late-Victorian and Edwardian tea table, where the point of a sandwich was refinement rather than sustenance, and where a hostess was expected to produce something her guests could not immediately identify. The trick relies on the fact that butter and fresh bread both absorb volatile aromatic compounds readily, the same principle behind the old practice of storing butter well away from onions and cheese, and behind the French enfleurage method of capturing flower scent in fat for perfumery. Butterick, whose cook book grew out of a dressmaking-pattern empire aimed at aspirational middle-class households, included a long sandwich chapter: no rare ingredient is needed here, only a garden and a covered dish. Clover is one of the versions named in period books, its scent honeyed rather than sharp.