Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
Almost every holiday comes with its own accompanying foodstuff. For Thanksgiving, it is turkey; for Hanukkah, donuts filled with a thick plug of sweetened jelly, or latkes. Many Muslims break their Ramadan fast each day with dates; people in Japan greet the New Year with mochi and soba noodles.
Easter treats seem self-evident: chocolate, eggs, chocolate eggs. But for hundreds of years, the English ate something entirely different at Easter: a sweet, herbal concoction—somewhere between a pancake and an omelette—known as a tansy.Tansies took their name from the herb tanacetum vulgare, which grows wild across the United Kingdom. With yellow flowers the shape of flying saucers, it had various charming nicknames, including bitter buttons, cow bitter, and golden buttons. Recipes for the simplest tansies are short and to the point. Per a “Mrs. Rendle”: “Pound a handful of green tansy in a mortar, add the juice to a pint of batter, and bake it.” As time went on, however, other herbs found their way into the mix. A recipe in the 1588 Good Housewife’s Handbook used the juice of tansy, feverfew, parsley, and violets, mixed with “the yolkes of eight or tenne eggs, and three or four whites, and some vinegar, and put thereto sugar or salt.” It was then fried. Essentially, it was a big, flat, slightly sweet pancake, with a faint greenish tinge.
It’s likely that tansies originally had a medicinal purpose. The herb itself was believed to cure various ailments: One 16th-century medical tract, Treasurie of Health, prescribes it soaked in a pint of wine for “a drinke for them that be hurte or brused,” while another claims that “it is good to dissolve windiness of the stomach and guts, and to kill worms in the belly, expelling them out. It is used also to provoke urine, and to break the stone of the [kidneys].” (Tansy is now known to be slightly poisonous.)
Its appearance on the Medieval Easter table, therefore, makes some sense. Throughout Lent, Christians endured a long, boring diet of…
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