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Nasturtium Sandwich (Cover the bread and butter)
Cover the bread and butter with nasturtium flowers over night; cut white bread thin and spread lightly with the butter. Put two nasturtium flowers between the slices.
A two-ingredient tea sandwich whose whole point is the overnight step: the butter and the bread take on the flowers' peppery scent, and the blossoms inside are as much decoration as filling.
- The hinge is the overnight infusionLay the cut bread and the block or pat of butter in a covered dish, bury both in fresh nasturtium blossoms, and leave them together. Butter picks up aromas readily, which is the entire mechanism here; skip the step and you have bread, butter and a flower.
- Do it in the refrigeratorThe recipe gives no storage instruction, so cover the dish tightly and refrigerate overnight, then let the butter come back to spreading temperature before you use it, or it will tear thin bread.
- Source the flowers carefullyTropaeolum majus flowers are edible, but only if grown without pesticides. Florist and garden-centre plants are routinely treated and are not food. Use blossoms from your own garden or from a grower selling them as edible.
- Rinse and dry, then check for insectsNasturtiums harbour aphids more than most garden flowers. Shake the blooms out, rinse briefly and dry thoroughly on a towel, since wet petals will make the buttered bread soggy.
- Cutting the breadA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, day-old, cuts thinner and cleaner than fresh. Butter to the edges, trim the crusts after assembly rather than before, and cut into fingers or triangles.
- Yield and servingTwo flowers per sandwich means roughly two dozen blossoms for a dozen rounds. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead, keep them covered with a damp cloth, and serve the same day, as the petals wilt and darken quickly against butter.
Nasturtiums came to European gardens from South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were used in the kitchen as well as the flower bed: the leaves went into salads, the green seed pods were pickled as a substitute for capers, and the flowers were used for colour and bite. In the era of the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon, the flower sandwich had become a small genre of its own. The technique behind it, perfuming butter by shutting it up overnight with something fragrant, is much older than the sandwich and is the same trick used for rose butter and for scenting cream with bay or vanilla. The dish tells you a good deal about the period's tea table, where a sandwich was expected to be pretty and delicate first and filling a distant second.