Cowslips!

“A curious belief [in Cheshire] about cowslips was that if they were planted upside down, they would come up red.” Christina Hole, Traditions and Customs of Cheshire

Christina Hole is not really a gardener, but rather a folklorist interested in domestic folklore, including gardening. Editor of the distinguished journal Folklore, she was described as “rather eccentric – according to the obituary she refused to have a telephone installed in her home even though it would have made her honorary duties easier and was ‘surrounded by well-behaved cats whose idiosyncracies gave [her] great pleasure.” Her successor at Folklore, Jacqueline Simpson described her as “I suppose one could call her ‘eccentric’ because of the cats and the no-phone, but it was a very quiet, ladylike form of eccentricity!”

The cowslip’s most famous culinary use is, of course, cowslip wine. But for those of you who might be daunted by gathering “475g cowslip flowers, 12 litres water, 3 kilograms of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of yeast,” I offer this recipe from Isaak Walton instead:

MINNOW-TANSIES

Although one of the smallest of the carp tribe, to which the majority of the coarse fish pertain, the minnow is one of the best of them to eat… There is no better method of cooking them than that recommended by Isaak Walton as I have proved. They should be “washed well in salt, and their heads and their tails cut off, and their guts taken out and not washed after.” They make “excellent minnow-tansies that is fried in yolks of eggs, the flowers of cowslips and of primroses and a little tansy; thus used they make a dainty dish of meat.” From The Wild Foods of Great Britain, L.C.R. Cameron (Also the author of the memorably-titled The Hunting Horn: What to Blow and How to Blow It.)