Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tansy Pudding
Tansy Pudding
This is an old-fashioned dish seldom to be met with at modern tables. Pound a handful of green tansy with three or four young spinach-leaves, and squeeze out the juice. Pour a pint of boiling milk over a quarter of a pound of bread-crumbs, and let it stand until cool. Add two ounces of butter, a glassful of brandy, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, the juice of half a lemon, and two table-spoonfuls of the tansy-juice. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, then add four well-beaten eggs. Pour the pudding into a buttered dish, and bake in a well-heated oven. Serve very hot, and sift powdered sugar thickly over the top of the pudding. A superior tansy pudding may be made by flavouring the milk with pounded almonds, and lining the edges of the dish with puff-paste before putting in the mixture. At old-fashioned tables the ordinary batter pudding may occasionally be seen coloured and flavoured with tansy-juice. Tansy-leaves have a peculiar bitter taste, and are said to act as a tonic. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 3d., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This is a genuine historical recipe, but its defining ingredient is a plant no longer treated as food. The notes below explain the problem rather than adapting the method.
- Tansy itself is the hazardCommon tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) contains thujone and related ketones, the same class of compound restricted in wormwood. Ingestion has been associated with vomiting, convulsions and liver and kidney injury, and the herb has a long record of use as an abortifacient. It is not permitted as a general food flavouring: US rules allow it only in alcoholic beverages, and EU rules cap thujone in foods and drinks.
- The dose cannot be controlledThujone content in tansy varies enormously between plants and chemotypes, from near-absent to dominant. "A handful of green tansy" pounded and squeezed gives no way to know how much of the active compound ends up in the two tablespoonfuls of juice, so there is no quantity that can be called safe by inspection.
- Baking does not fix itThree-quarters of an hour in a domestic oven cannot be relied on to destroy or drive off thujone. The bitterness the book calls "a tonic" comes from the plant's own bitter constituents, which are the reason for caution.
- The "superior" version is no betterAlmonds and puff paste change nothing about the tansy juice. Nor does the batter-pudding variant mentioned at the end, which uses the same juice purely for colour and flavour.
- Misidentification riskThe name tansy is also attached to tansy ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris), which carries pyrrolizidine alkaloids and is hepatotoxic in its own right. Nothing in the instruction distinguishes them.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a baked bread-and-egg pudding from a modern source. Spinach juice alone will give the green colour, since the recipe already calls for spinach-leaves alongside the tansy.
A "tansy" was once a dish in its own right rather than a flavouring: medieval and early modern English cooks beat eggs with cream, breadcrumbs and the juice of bitter green herbs, and the name attached itself to the resulting baked or fried custard even when the herb was reduced to a token. It belonged to spring, and particularly to Easter, when tansies were eaten after Lent — often said to echo the bitter herbs of the Passover, though the association may be later rationalising of what was simply the first green thing available. Tansy had a second reputation as a vermifuge and spring tonic, which is the tradition Cassell's is repeating when it notes the leaves "are said to act as a tonic." By the time this dictionary appeared the dish was already a curiosity, as the opening line admits: sugar, brandy, lemon and almonds had crowded out the herb, and what survived was a rich bread pudding with a green tint and a memory of bitterness.