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Violet Sandwich
Cover the butter with violets over night; slice white bread thin and spread with the butter; put slices together and cover with the petals of the violets.
A scented-butter sandwich rather than a filled one: the butter takes up the perfume of the flowers overnight, and the petals are decoration at the end. Nothing is cooked, so everything depends on the butter and the flowers.
- The hinge: it is an infusion, not a fillingFat absorbs floral aromatics readily, and that is the whole mechanism here. Set a block or bowl of butter in a closed container and bury it in loose blossoms overnight (a cool place or the refrigerator); the blossoms are lifted off before spreading, though the recipe's closing instruction suggests their petals may be the same ones used to cover the finished sandwiches.
- Use sweet violets, not African violetsThe flower meant is Viola odorata or a garden pansy relative, which is edible and strongly perfumed. African violet (Saintpaulia) is an unrelated houseplant and is not a food. Only scented violets do anything useful in this recipe.
- SourcingFlorist and garden-centre flowers are routinely treated with pesticides and are not sold for eating. Use blossoms you have grown yourself without sprays, or flowers labelled as culinary, and rinse and dry them well.
- ButterUnsalted butter carries the scent more cleanly and should be soft enough to spread without tearing thin bread. Bring it back to cool room temperature after its night with the violets.
- "White bread thin"The recipe gives no measurement; a close-crumbed sandwich loaf cut as thin as it will bear, perhaps a quarter inch, suits it, and crusts may be trimmed after assembly. Chilling the loaf briefly makes thin slicing much easier.
- The petal garnishPetals pressed onto the outside will wilt and brown within an hour or two. Assemble close to serving and keep the sandwiches under a damp cloth in the refrigerator until then.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; something like a cup of loosely packed blossoms to half a pound of butter is a workable starting point. Cut into fingers or triangles and serve as part of a tea tray, not as a course on its own.
Flower-scented butters belong to a long tradition of perfuming fat and sugar by contact rather than by extract: rose, orange flower and violet were all handled this way before commercial flavouring essences were cheap and reliable. Violet in particular was the fashionable scent of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, turning up in pastilles, cordials, crystallised petals and confectionery, so a violet sandwich on a tea table read as elegant rather than eccentric. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of early twentieth-century sandwich books, which multiplied dainty variations on thin bread and butter for ladies' luncheons, card parties and afternoon teas, when the sandwich was judged as much on looks and delicacy as on substance.