Perfumery

The tenth entry is l’enfleurage, and the noun folded into the middle of it is a word English owns twice over without noticing. Latin florem gave French la fleur, and French handed it on in the Middle Ages, when it was written « flour » and meant a blossom. It also meant the finest part of anything, since the flower is what a plant puts forward at its best; and the finest part of ground wheat was therefore the flour of the meal. One spelling did both jobs for centuries, and a medieval reader saw nothing odd in that. Only late did the printers settle the matter, leaving the blossom with « flower » and the milled wheat with « flour », so that two words which are one now look like strangers. French never divided them: la fleur de farine is the finest flour, la fleur de sel the first crust lifted off a salt pan, la fine fleur the best of any company. Which is exactly what l’enfleurage asks the petals to give up.