Heart to Hearth Cookery

Early Spring Tansy

It is definitely Spring!  The first tansy (pictured left) has just started to show its fern-like leaves.  It is at this stage that the herb is the best to harvest for the many receipts (recipes) for Tansy.  Nicholas Culpepper (a 17th century herbalist) wrote of the Spring use of tansy:  Also it consumes the phlegmatic humours, the cold and moist constitution of Winter most usually effects the body of man with, and that was the first reason of eating tansies in the Spring.  … The herb fried with eggs (as it is the custom in the Spring-time) which is called a Tansy, helps to digest and carry downward those bad humours that trouble the stomach.   The receipt that I use for demonstrating a tansy uses the juice of the tansy, milk, grated Naples Biskets, sugar, eggs with more whites than yolks, nutmeg and butter.  Every time I prepare it I can not help but think  of Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham!

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