If the Snuff is not required to be of a very excellent quality, and you are unwilling to waste more of it than can possibly be avoided, wash it only once, and slightly cleanse it. This purgation may the better suffice, if while drying in the sun, you take care to knead the Snuff into a cake several times, and often sprinkle it with some sweet-scented Water.
314. Method of scenting Snuff.
The Flowers that most readily communicate their flavour to Snuff are Orange Flowers, Jasmine, Musk Roses, and Tuberoses. You must procure a box lined with dry white paper; in this strow your Snuff on the bottom about the thickness of an inch, over which place a thin layer of Flowers, then another layer of Snuff, and continue to lay your Flowers and Snuff alternately in this manner, until the box is full. After they have lain together four and twenty hours, sift your Snuff through a sieve to separate it from the Flowers, which are to be thrown away, and fresh ones applied in their room in the former method. Continue to do this till the Snuff is sufficiently scented; then put it into a canister, which keep close stopped.
Put your Flowers that are placed over each layer of the Snuff, between two pieces of white paper pricked full of holes with a large pin, and sift through a sieve the Snuff that may happen to get between the papers. To scent the Snuff perfectly it is necessary to renew the Flowers four or five times. This method is the least troublesome of the two.
A very agreeable scented Snuff may be made with Roses, by taking Rose-buds, stripping off the green cup, and pistil that rises in the middle, and fixing in its place a Clove; being careful not to separate the Leaves that are closed together. The Rose-buds thus prepared, are to be exposed to the heat of the sun a whole month, inclosed in a glass well stopped, and are then fit for use.
To make Snuff scented with a thousand Flowers, take a number of different Flowers, and mix them together, proportioning the quantity of each Flower, to the degree of its perfume, so that the flavour of no one particular Flower may be predominant.
Take some Snuff, and rub it in your hands with a little Civet, opening the body of the Civet still more by rubbing it in your hands with fresh Snuff; and when you have mixed it perfectly with the Snuff, put them into a canister. Snuff is flavoured with other perfumes in the same way.