SC - Ras's Pennsic Drooling

[Alderton, Philippa]

Michael P Newton wrote:
> 
> I have a quandary which has come up again: is tansy poisonous, and if so,
> why do I keep running into recipes in period or near period, which call
> for tansy as the main flavorings?

Lawyers, my dear lady. Lawyers. That is why. Seriously, though, I
suspect the simplest answer is that tansy contains some toxic element or
ingredient which you are unlikely to absorb unless you really immerse
yourself in the stuff. In other words, casual and occasional consumption
of tansy probably wouldn't do you any harm, but that doesn't mean it is
impossible for it to do you harm. It's just that I don't know what
constitutes a harmful dosage.

> It is especially madding considering that I have planted three tansy
> plants outside my kitchen window to repel the ants {which worked for a
> while}. When I bought them, they came with a warning that they were
> poisonous, then I found some recipes in my herbal books, but our local
> herbalist thought they were similar to wormwood, in that flavoring
> wouldn't kill you but it was to picky to mess around with.Now I find two
> more recipes in the _A concise encyclopedia of Gastronomy_, one of which
> says that a "Tansy" in England was the name of a custard flavored with
> tansy or other bitterish leaves. The other recipe is for a pudding.
> Has anyone else come across these or similar  recipes,preferably in
> period sources? Is it really poisonous or only in large quantities? Does
> anyone have any other uses for tansy?

I have seen the reference you mention. There are several recipes from
period sources that indicate that a tansy (apparently contracted from
the Greek term, "athanasia", which more or less means "banishing death",
or some such) is more of an omelette than a custard. The herb tansy does
sometimes appear as an ingredient in a tansy, if you get my meaning, but
sometimes it is absent, in favor of a mixed assortment of herbs and
greens. If you find a recipe for an herbolaste, erbolaste, or arbolaste,
they are virtually the same, except those last often contain cheese,
which a tansy lacks, IIRC. The impression I get is that a tansy would be
eaten as a Spring tonic, to cure or forestall the effects of various
vitamin-deficiency diseases like scurvy, which could have come on over
the Winter, when fresh vegetable matter was hard to come by. 

A friend of mine, who used to dabble in herbal medicine, made me a
marvelous bruise ointment of lanolin, with infusions of tansy, boneset,
comfrey, oil of cloves, and oil of wintergreen. It killed pain almost
immediately on contact, and somehow flushed the bits of coagulated blood
from the injury, causing it to heal up much faster. I'm talking fighting
bruises here, not casual elbow-cracks. Unfortunately the recipe seems to
have been lost, but I still have quite a bit of the stuff left, and it
seems to grow more potent with age.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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