Tansy cake

{{short description|Medieval pancake}}

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Tansy was a traditional Easter food in medieval English cuisine.{{cite web |title=Tansy |website=Oxford Reference |url=https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803102044456}} Its name came from the tansy plant. The simplest version of the recipe was made by baking a batter flavored with green tansy juice. Later recipes, like the one from the 16th-century Good Housewife's Handbook added more ingredients like parsley, feverfew and violets to an egg batter that was fried like pancakes, though with a slightly green coloring from the addition of tansy and other herbs.{{cite web |title=Remembering the Tansy, the Forgotten Easter Pancake of Centuries Past |website=Atlas Obscura |date=30 March 2018 |url=https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-tansy-easter}} Baked tansy could also be given a green color by adding spinach juice. An 18th-century recipe from The Compleat Housewife added sack to the batter and sweetened the fried tansies with gooseberries and a topping of crushed sugar.

Cakes and wine were a common feature of Easter traditions. Some 19th-century authors believed that the tradition of eating tansy cakes, which had a sweet and bitter flavor, was connected to Jewish traditions of eating cakes made with bitter herbs.{{cite book |title=Notes and Queries |date=1885 |publisher=Oxford University Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vCE5uNoThaIC&dq=tansy+cakes&pg=PA261}} Sometimes the tansy was closer to a pudding than a pancake, like Hannah Glasse's 18th-century recipe in the Art of Cookery, an elaborate dish with Naples biscuits, butter, cream, blanched almonds, eggs, grated bread, rose water, orange blossom water and other spices and sweeteners.{{cite book |title=Table Talk Volume 28 | year=1913 | publisher=Pierce Publishing Company |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=kBhIAAAAYAAJ}}