Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
In addition, this page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Tansy Pudding
Tansy Pudding
(Old English recipe.) This is still eaten in country towns, and is considered wholesome in the spring. Pour 3 tablespoonfuls of the expressed juice of bruised tansy leaves over enough bread-crumbs to absorb it, add 3 ounces of blanched and pounded almonds, 2 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of butter, 1 teaspoonful of grated lemon peel, 3 beaten eggs, 1/2 pint of cream or milk. Boil, like a custard, and serve with lemon sauce, hot.
The custard technique here is unremarkable; the problem is the defining ingredient. Common tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) is not a culinary herb by any current standard, and three tablespoons of its expressed juice is a substantial dose.
- Tansy is toxicThe plant's essential oil is high in thujone, a neurotoxic ketone that in quantity causes vomiting, convulsions and liver and kidney damage. Poisonings and deaths from tansy preparations are documented in nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical literature, most often from tansy oil or strong infusions taken deliberately.
- The dose is uncontrolledThujone content in tansy varies enormously between plants, chemotypes and seasons, so no volume of "expressed juice of bruised tansy leaves" corresponds to a known dose. A recipe of this kind cannot be made safe by reducing the quantity, because the strength of the raw material is unknown.
- Its old reputation as a spring tonicThe line about being "considered wholesome in the spring" reflects tansy's long use as a vermifuge and blood-purifier. The same properties that made it a worm medicine — bitterness and thujone — are what make it hazardous as food.
- Abortifacient useTansy was historically taken to induce abortion, and a number of the recorded fatal poisonings arose that way. It is one of the main routes by which tansy poisoning entered the medical record, and reason enough to keep the plant out of the kitchen.
- Not the same as tansy-flavoured modern dishesModern versions of English 'tansies' are commonly coloured and flavoured with spinach juice, sorrel or mint rather than the herb itself. If you want the dish, use a current recipe written on that basis.
- On the rest of the methodFor reference only: half a pint is one cup on American measure, or about a cup and a quarter if the older English pint is meant, and "boil, like a custard" means the old stovetop sense of stirring over gentle heat until it thickens, not an actual boil, which would scramble the eggs.
Tansy puddings and "tansies" were an Easter and Lent dish in England for centuries, eaten through the spring and often explained as a bitter counterpart to the Passover herbs or as a corrective after a winter of salt meat and no greens. Early forms were closer to a herb omelette or fried egg cake; by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the tansy had softened into a baked or boiled almond custard like this one, with the herb reduced to a green juice, a colour and a bitter note. That a compiler files it as an "Old English recipe" still eaten "in country towns" is telling: by then the dish was already a survival, remembered in the provinces and curious enough to be worth reporting. Its slow disappearance owes as much to changing taste as to any medical judgement, though the toxicity of the plant was well understood by physicians long before the dish left the table.