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Minnow
This is a diminutive fish whose home is in rivers, brooks, and canals. It is best known, perhaps, as affording amusement to juvenile anglers. The flavour of the minnow is good, and when a sufficient number can be procured by a casting-net, they make an excellent fry, not unlike whitebait, but rather luscious and cloying. In Izaak Walton's time, a dish called minnow tansies was made from them, now quite out of use. The minnows were gutted, well washed in salt and water, and their heads and tails being cut off, they were put with yolks of eggs, well beaten, a few cowslips and primrose-flowers, and a little tansy, shredded small, and fried in butter. The sauce was butter, vinegar or verjuice, and sugar.
Cassell's gives this as an antiquarian note rather than a working recipe, and there is a reason it was already "quite out of use" by the 1890s. Several of its ingredients are no longer things a cook should put on a plate.
- Tansy is the problemTanacetum vulgare contains thujone, a neurotoxin, in quantities that vary widely from plant to plant and season to season. No reliable safe culinary dose can be given, and the recipe asks only for "a little tansy". The herb's disappearance from cooking is usually put down to changing tastes as much as to any recognition of its toxicity.
- Cowslips and primrosesBoth were gathered freely in Walton's England, and cowslips in particular are far scarcer now. In the UK it is an offence to uproot wild plants without the landowner's permission, and it is an offence to sell wild-picked primroses. Wild-gathered flowers are not a casual ingredient.
- The fish itselfMinnows are a coarse fish, and netting freshwater fish in England generally requires authorisation from the Environment Agency; cast-netting of the sort described would not be permitted on most waters, and the rules differ again in Wales and Scotland. The comparison to whitebait is about size and treatment, not species.
- VerjuiceThe sour juice of unripe grapes or crab apples, used where a cook now reaches for lemon or wine vinegar. It is sold again by specialist grocers, rather milder and rounder than vinegar.
- "A tansy" as a dishThe word names both the herb and a whole family of egg dishes it flavoured — closer to a thick sweetened omelette or fried custard than to anything savoury. That is why the sauce here is butter, acid and sugar.
- No quantities, no timesThe passage gives neither numbers nor a pan temperature, because Cassell's is paraphrasing a seventeenth-century description rather than setting down a method. If the idea of a herbed, flower-scented fried egg dish appeals, work from a current recipe using safe culinary herbs.
Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) is the source Cassell's is leaning on, and the passage is close to a paraphrase of his own account of what to do with a netful of minnows. Tansies were a spring dish with a strong seasonal and religious association: the bitter herb was eaten around Lent and Easter, often said to recall the bitter herbs of the Passover, and its arrival coincided with the first cowslips and primroses. By the time this dictionary was compiled the whole genre had faded. The entry survives here as a curiosity, filed under a fish that Cassell's plainly regards as a boy's catch rather than a fishmonger's stock.