enfleurage

Enfleurage is a pure French word: from enfleurer, to steep in flowers, itself from en (in) and fleur (flower). The technique it names is one of the oldest and most labor-intensive methods of fragrance extraction, developed to systematic refinement in the perfume workshops of Grasse — a hilltop town in Provence that became the center of the European fragrance industry in the seventeenth century, partly because of its proximity to fields of jasmine, tuberose, and rose. Grasse had flowers; enfleurage gave those flowers a way to speak to the nose without being destroyed by heat.