Medieval culinary glossary: tansy

Tansy with ants. By Georg Buzin.

Here is my draft entry for ‘tansy’ in my encyclopaedic medieval culinary glossary, which will cover all ingredients, equipment and methods mentioned in the John Rylands Library copy of Richard II’s cookery treatise, Fourme of Cury, which dates to around the year 1390.

tansy tansay. This aromatic flowering plant, Tanecetum vulgare, a native perennial of Britain, was grown in medieval gardens as a medicinal or culinary herb.[1] It is listed in Ælfric of Eynsham’s vocabulary of the late tenth century, so was likely cultivated in monastic gardens of the time.[2] It was also grown in the fourteenth century by the gardener and botanist Friar Henry Daniel,[3]  and  is one of many herbs in the fourteenth-century poetic treatise on gardening by ‘Master John Gardener’,[4] which indicates its status as a herb of royal and elite gardens. Its use in Fourme of Cury is limited to one dish, ‘Erbolate’ (170, ch. 1), a kind of frittata or omelette. In several fifteenth-century recipe collections the juice of tansy is used in making an omelette known either by the plant’s name or as ‘tansy cake’.[5] There are modern-day concerns about tansy’s toxicity.[6]

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[1] Online Plant Atlas 2020, Tancetum vulgare Tanacetum vulgare L. in BSBI Online Plant Atlas 2020 [accessed 30 November 2023].

[2] Harvey, Gardens, p. 178.

[3] Harvey, Gardens, p. 178.

[4] Gardener, p. 166, line 176.

[5] Hieatt, Culinary Recipes, pp. 144-45; Hieatt lists four occurrences of the recipe in her Concordance, p. 95, and a further three in her Supplement, p. 169.  

[6] WebMD, https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-686/tansy [accessed 30 November 2023].

Select bibliography

Gardener, John. Alicia M. Tyssen Amherst, ‘A Fifteenth-Century Treatise on Gardening by “Mayster Ion Gardener”’, Archaeologia 54 (1894), pp. 157-72.

Harvey, John. Medieval Gardens (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1981).

Hieatt, Constance B., ‘Supplement to the Concordance of English Recipes: Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries’, in Constance B. Hieatt (ed. & trans), Cocatrice and Lampray Hay: Late Fifteenth-Century Recipes from Corpus Christi College Oxford (Prospect Books, 2012), pp. 145-172.

Hieatt, Constance B. (compiled and trans.). The Culinary Recipes of Medieval England: An Epitome of Recipes from Extant Medieval English Culinary Manuscripts (Prospect Books, 2013).

Hieatt, Constance B. and Terry Nutter with Johnna H. Holloway. Concordance of English Recipes: Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Centuries (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006).