Renaissance Tansie Recipes

Enjoy An Authentic Renaissance Tansie Recipe At Easter Or Anytime

Renaissance Tansie recipes were quite common during the Renaissance Era and were also popular during Medieval times.

Tansies are an ancient custard-like pancake dish that incorporated rich cream and eggs and was sometimes thickened with dry bread crumbs.

Apple slices were often added to the tansie batter along with lemon juice, but it could also contain other types of fruit, such as thin slices of lemon, or even edible flower blossoms. Spinach juice was traditionally used to colour the batter green.

In medieval times, tansies were often garnished with bitter-tasting leaves from the herb "tansy," from which they were given their name, and they were eaten at Easter in remembrance of the "bitter herbs" of Passover, and as a supposed blood-cleanser after eating large quantities of salted fish during Lent.

Though they were traditionally eaten year-round, they were especially popular around Easter time. You won't find a more traditional Easter recipe to enjoy.

If you have difficulty reading the Early-Modern-English style of writing, or you need to shed light on any outdated ingredient names and cooking terms, please refer to...

The Renaissance Dessert Recipes Glossary

To make an Apple Tanfie

Take a Quart of Cream, one Manchet grated, the yolks of ten Eggs, and four Whites, a little Salt, fome Sugar, and a little Spice, then cut your Apples in round thin flices, and lay them into your Frying-Pan in order, your Batter being hot, when your Apples are fried, pour in your Butter, and fry it on the one fide, then turn it on a Pie-Plate and flide it into the Pan again, and fry it, then put it on a Pie-Plate, and fqueeze the Juice of a Limon over it, and ftrew on fine Sugar, and ferve it to the Table.

To make a green Tanfie to fry, or boil over a Pot

Take a quart of Cream, the yolks of one dozen of Eggs and half, their Whites well beat, mix them together, and put in one Nutmeg grated, then colour it well with the Juice of Spinage, and fweeten it with Sugar; then fry it with Butter as you do the other, and ferve it in the fame manner; but you muft lay thin flices of Limon upon this.

If you will not fry it, then butter a Difh, and pour it therein, and fet it upon a Pot of boiling water till it be enough; this is the better and eafier way.

Thus you may make Tanfies of any other things, as Cowflips, Rasberries, Violets, Marigolds, Gilliflowers, or any fuch like, and colour them with their Juice; you may ufe green Wheat inftead of Spinage.