17^th century

Apple Tansy

Atansy is a medieval egg bake using the bitter herb tansy. It would have been a dish made exclusively in spring when the tansy herb isn’t poisonous. Because of this seasonal link, the dish became associated with Easter and Lent. It would indeed be a perfect dish to use up the last eggs before fasting. Intriguing is the fact that in Flanders we have a pancake called ‘kruidkoek’ which is also made using tansy. It is a pancake that is now only eaten around the town of Diest, but it used to be a national dish.

Recipes for the English tansy first appear in 1430; of course, it would have been around for some time by then, but cookery manuscripts from that period are scarce. In early cookery books and manuscripts there was usually just the one recipe for a tansy, but soon we find recipes for an apple tansy, a damson tansy, and other variations often even omitting the bitter herb that gives its name to this dish. It is a possibility that this is because the herb is poisonous when picked at any other time than spring, and people still wanted to cook up a tansy at other times of the year when they had eggs to use up. By the seventeenth century, cream is added, along with spices such as nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon and probably mace. Breadcrumbs are also added sometimes.

To make an Apple-Tansey

Pare your Apples and cut them in thin round slices, then fry them in good sweet Butter, then take ten Eggs, sweet Cream, Nutmeg, Cinamon, Ginger, Sugar, with a little Rose-water, beat all these together, and poure it upon your Apples and fry it.

WM, The Compleat Cook, 1658

At some point in the eighteenth century the tansy recipes are renamed ‘tansy puddings’. Although tansies are usually prepared in a pan, over a fire, the Scottish Elizabeth Cleland in A New and Easy Method of Cookery in 1755 also gives a recipe for a ‘plain tansy’ cooked in the dripping pan under roasting meat, just like dripping puddings. Tansies are still cooked in Britain today, but now it is a name for a kind of pudding of which there are many variations.

Makes a 25 cm (10 inch) pancake; serves 4–6

1–2 dessert apples, such as jonagold

butter, for frying

3 eggs

50 ml (1¾ fl oz) thin (pouring) cream

1 teaspoon rosewater

a pinch each of ground nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger

1 teaspoon sugar

Core the apples and slice them thinly.

Make a batter by whisking the eggs with the cream, rosewater and the spices.

Melt some butter in a large frying pan. Arrange the apple slices neatly in the pan and fry them lightly. When they start to color, turn them over and pour the egg mixture over the top. Fry over low heat until the mixture has set, as you would an omelette.

Serve with the sugar strewn over.

Why not try with plums, peaches or (in spring only) with some actual fresh-picked tansy, finely chopped?