ISSUE 3, HERBS, Part 4: Tansy

The Bitter Herb

Tansy

I spent many free hours during my undergraduate years at the College of William & Mary wandering colonial Williamsburg, haunting the printing shop or monitoring the gardens.  The herb gardens attracted me because the beds housed plants unheard of in mom’s kitchen—comfrey, germander, pennyroyal, woodruff, borage, rue, and tansy.  I didn’t reckon these were the ingredients of poison craft or witchery.  (Williamsburg is the anti-Salem of colonial historic sites—all about Enlightenment, not ancient mysteries.) The gardener quickly taught me that the herbs were meant for other tastes than those schooled in the suburbs of Washington D. C. in the mid-20th century.  “Try some of that Tansy there . . . They made a pudding out of that.“ The plant, then in bloom, had yellow button shaped flowers and green leaves. I popped three green leaves in my mouth.  Instantly the bitter oils turned my tongue scrunchy.  “That kind of dessert will make the guests leave quickly.”  The gardener nodded agreement.

“Cooks would run meat laid our ready for grilling with tansy leaves to keep the flies off.  The oil kills moths and people too if you drink enough of it.  But in small doses . . . it is good for gout!”

I was 21 then and not troubled with gout.  Nor for that matter had I yet tasted bitters, the herbal concoction ingested with hard spirits to counter the deleterious effects of alcohol.  Tansy would up in many a formula for those “medicinals.”  In Kentucky in the 1870s Colonel Bob Wooley attempted to wean the population from putting mint in juleps by substituting tansy—the effort was considered whimsical.  (Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, May 27, 1878, 1). 

In the old wisdom a bitter plant was suspected of being medicinal.  Yet there are many bitter things growing wild in the world, some poisonous, some obnoxious, and some efficacious if one moderates the intake.  I like to think that tea, coffee, and chocolate were all introduced into the West in the 17th century as bitter medicinals, prepared in liquid as a decoction.  Medical books counseled that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down—actually cream, milk, and sugar.  And so it is that Brits dowse tea with cream and sugar, that milk chocolate exists, and cream and sugar are the inevitable first call additives at the coffee shop.  Several people I know have become interested in Yaupon (a bitter member of the holly family that alone N. America of Native plants contains caffeine and theobromine.  It is a rather bitter brew on its own.  So flavoring the tea, or sweetening it, of smoothing it out with dairy is much on the entrepreneurial mind. 

Once tansy pudding or tansy prepared with eggs was an Easter tradition, supposed to clean out foul humors and put your system in balance.  The recipe sounds enticing, since the hard edge of the herb is mellowed with eggs and cream.  The piquant green color of the leaves, mingles well with the yellow of cooked egg.  But the chemistry of the plant is somewhat odd.  Pigs and goats won’t eat it. Cows and Sheep will.  It had the reputation of inhibiting carrion flies, so if you didn’t want a deer carcass afflicted, you rubbed tansy on the flesh.  Some have noted the herb’s use in European mummifications.  Tansy tea was supposed to assist with gout, fevers, and respiratory problems, but little modern medical confirmation of these effects has been forthcoming.  In the 19th century the newspapers were filled with pieces about how tansy oil fatally poisoned various people (but the stories have the kind of fanciful scariness that attaches to stories of people dying in quicksand).  Apparently is was a cheap remedy for toothache. 

Tansy Bitters—a decoction of Tansy root—was a popular digestif in the 18th century.  The theory was if you add it to hard alcohol (gin etc.), its bitter chemistry would zero out the effect of the alcohol.  It was supplanted by Angostura, Pechaud, and Vaughan’s in the mid 1800s and declined into being a patent medicine panacea.

In the 1850s a suspicion arose that the root system of tansy suffused the soil with chemicals that inhibited root rot in fruit trees.  Peach orchards began being under planted with tansy.  Alas a success of insect and other afflictions made growing peach trees a challenge in later decades. 

But what most astonishes when reading old magazines is the chaotic variety of things it was used for—moth repellant, regulator of menstrual cycles, wormer, whitener, Rabies cure, anti-flatulence dose, measles medicine, abortificant.  The old bitter herbs got connected in the folk imagination with the whole range of human afflictions and agricultural uses.  Some of these employments such as moth control had centuries of support.  Others were “notions.” 

I wouldn’t mind having a plate of bracing bitter eggs this coming Easter.  It would be a good counterweight to the hot cross bun I will be munching.