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A Yin and Yang of Brewing
November 30, 2018 December 1, 2018 by Gary
Not quite in haste, but as travels loom some quick notes on two beers that to my mind sum up the best of the old and new schools of brewing.
They are, Holsten Festbock, a dark brown bock at 7% ABV, and Hopsta La Vista, a 6.5% ABV from Longslice Brewing in Toronto.
The first shines with its rich malt character, molasses-like even though the beer is pure malt and hops. Holsten is based in Hamburg since 1879 and part of Carlsberg today. Hamburg is hardly a storied centre of bock brewing, that province belongs to the south, Bavaria.
But Holsten's is one of the best I've had anywhere, and recalls surely too a time when all beers were maltier. One or two beer types apart, e.g., Lambic/sours, 19th-century IPA, perhaps unblended aged porter, all beers were once maltier.
Just as the late Canadian-American beer legend Bert Grant once stated that all beers used to be hoppier, they also used to be maltier. The two traits together made beer to all intents and purposes what it was.
Today, many beers still meet the bill, especially under conditions of the beer revival, but they are not always easy to find. The adjunct/light/dry/ice waves in brewing internationally, say from the 1950s-1990s, had their impact on craft brewing, too. Hop character was brought back (frequently) by craft brewing but malt character is sometimes neglected despite frequent use of all-malt mashes.
One reason is attenuations, or the degree to which fermentation is allowed to proceed, are often still too thorough, for our taste that is.
Hopsta la Vista, a craft IPA, offers a pleasing rich clean malt character, almost shortbread-like. And the big hop character is a given. It's also a reliable beer, changing little since inception some years ago.
The two are a yin and yang as despite being opposites historically and commercially they are in perfect synch as representing the best the beer world can offer.
I understand the Holsten is only flash-pasteurized today, which brings its character more in line with craft. Craft or artisan beer generally skips any form of pasteurization, a process many consider has some impact on beer character.
There is a wealth of good beer to choose from today, and you will rarely go wrong dipping into the craft world – there is very little bad beer, as opposed, say to 25 years ago. But choosing well offers the best chance of a great experience.
A local IPA I'd class with Hopsta is Boneshaker IPA from Amsterdam Brewery. Its honeyed-like malt quality offers again a taste of old-time beer, malt that enriches and gladdens both fibre and soul.
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A Gentleman's Home (and Tavern)
November 20, 2018 November 20, 2018 by Gary
In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in August 1933 a builder advertised a high-class residence. The ad reads and is laid out like a free verse poem:
A Gentleman's Home
Rockville Center, L.I.
At the Golf Course.
We have just created a new type home.
A Gentleman's Home.
English Architecture, Colonial plan.
Stone, brick, cement and timber.
Tree shaded front terrace.
Center foyer entrance hall.
One step down living room.
Exposures east, south and west.
Massive stone fireplace.
Heavy beamed ceiling.
Rough textured, tinted walls.
Built-in, recessed boot shelves
British conceptions dominated the post-WW I invention of suburban estate living, down to the adjacent golf course (still Scottish in American minds, then).
Basement English. Tavern room.
Embedded stained timber walls.
Built-in bar and lounge.
Modern, efficient laundry room…
For arrivistes or others with deep pockets who found "basement English. Tavern room" unclear, a "built-in bar and lounge" would have been reassuring.
The aesthetic was and is known as "country club". It marries architectural, landscape, and decorative motifs of vaguely English inspiration with the latest modern conveniences, down in this case to Shlage locks and a "scientific kitchen".
The builder was Levitt & Sons. Ring a bell? Levittown? The famous, affordable suburb-template, studied since the 1950s by legions of sociologists and cultural historians, was just one arrow in the Levitts' quiver. They specialized in the country estate development too, for a different demographic of course.
The drawing in the Daily Eagle ad shows Tudor Revival strapwork and peaked roofing, much like the (1923) hotel in Niagara Falls I discussed yesterday.
There are many residences of this type in Toronto, built around the same time. Toronto was even more propitious for the concept given its strong British identity in the early 1900s. These homes probably were fitted with tavern rooms, too.
Needless to say, this isn't the type of tavern Archie Bunker and friends frequented. The Long Island recessed home's tavern room and its Manhattan commercial equivalent were stylized versions of the real thing, something imagined by American designers as symbolizing comfort, tradition, and dignified downtime.
If you were of English ancestry lolling in your Rockville Center home tavern, or having a Martini with a client in the midtown equivalent, the experience was probably heightened. But the average American aspiring to buy these beautiful residences was probably not English, or had mixed ancestry, as typical of United States social patterns.
Still, the imagery was potent and aroused the response expected. The whys and wherefores are embedded in the origins of the American project and its subsequent development. The long prestige of things British had accelerated as memories of the Revolution faded, and given too the cooperation of 1917-1918 and then the League of Nations.
British cultural prestige crested here in the last 30 years as North America gained its own confidence and our own, homegrown aesthetics found favour worldwide and not least in Britain.
The emblems of Britannia are being forgotten here or at least have blurred – the very concept of Britain, or "England", has. The onset of the European Union and globalization has weakened the notions of British culture and British civilization imbued in every schoolchild in Canada until recently and inherited culturally in the United States.
What of Rockville Center, L.I.? Not surprisingly, a 2014 article in the New York Times described it as an "urbanized suburb", or "mini-Manhattan". A handsome, 1931 Tudor residence pictured may well have been built by the Levitts. The buildings are still there.
As to taverns and tavern drinks, the India Pale Ale bequeathed by Britons to America did return after a near disappearance, but the composition is altered. And they drink our kind in Blighty, now. In a 1977 Red Rose Tea commercial, a Briton muttered with mixed admiration and irritation, "Only in Canada, eh?".
Not IPA, today. Back at ya.
The last word goes to the lyricist of Long Island:
Tennis, beaches, riding academy.
Motor parkway and lake.
Thirty-two minutes to Manhattan.
The complete price.
Ten Thousand Five Hundred.
May be inspected any time.
Yours until sold.
Tudor Reign on the Niagara
This 1923 article in the Niagara Falls Gazette describes the origins of an English-style inn in Niagara Falls, NY. The story is unusually lengthy and smoothly written.
It illustrates well the continued, nay enhanced, appeal of the "olde English inn" in American social life by 1923. In that year, a hotel was erected on the site of a demolished German-American hotel, the Kaltenbach, renowned locally and beyond since the mid-1800s.
The new place was – and is – called the Red Coach Inn, perched above the high rapids a few hundred yards from the American Falls.
The design motifs of an earlier English period, via Tudor Revival, had a strong appeal due to the implied gentility – social status in a word. While the cozy English taproom had to be left out due to Prohibition, the Red Coach Inn otherwise gave full vent to the old English hostelry of American imagination.
A small sample:
Mounting a circular staircase to the second floor the guest is ushered into a most inviting parlor off which there is a ladies' retiring room. The furnishing of this suite of reception rooms is rich and striking, the lounges and chairs being in quaint old fashioned chintz, the walls in panels delicately tinted in soft, harmonious colors. The same holds true in the guest chambers throughout the inn. The walls are adorned with rare old English prints.
On this floor is the French dining salon which is a dream of quiet refinement. The color motif on walls, panels and ceilings is French grey, the hangings in chintz and the tables and chairs in old colonial style. The china and silverware were made expressly for this establishment, all china having a picture of the coach and four with the words "Red Coach Inn". The silverware, as well as the blankets, spreads, towelling, bed and table linen, have the monogram of the inn marked on them. The bedrooms are designed to furnish every comfort to the guest. The furniture is actually sumptuous. The beds in single and double are in Tiffany bronze effect with rich floral ornamentations. The dressers and other appointments are of like character.
The images in sum evoke conceptions of genteel English country life and storied Colonial days, all suggestive of a fixed social order, serenity, and a timeless beauty. (The reality was quite different, but that is a different matter).
There was a Red Coach Inn in Niagara Falls, NY in the early 1800s when coaching inns were important in American life, so building a new one had more justice than often accompanies such projects.
In any case, using building and decorative styles of recognized authority conveyed gravitas and status, an idea as old as the hills. In a later period, Victorian styles were borrowed to similar effect (1960s until today). 1923 was too early, though, to recognize Victoriana in this way.
By the 1930s the English inn or tavern idea had burgeoned and inspired new or renovated restaurants, bars, and hotels, to please the aspirant classes and extract lucre from their expanding pocketbooks. In the classic American way, it was win-win. Everybody Was Happy.
With the arrival of Repeal in 1933 the Red Coach Inn could now serve liquor. The hotel went from strength to strength, taking advantage of its location and concurrent growth of Niagara Falls as Honeymoon Capital of the World. Indeed the hotel is still going strong today, pictured above are two images from its website.
A final, and rather local note: the Gazette noted that the hotel manager, who had also superintended the Kaltenbach hotel, had many friends in Toronto and anticipated their patronage of the new hotel. This supplies another clue why the British motif was selected rather than continuing the site's earlier German flavour.
In American eyes then and until relatively recently, "Canada" was a cipher for "British". Bearing in mind too that things Teutonic were not exactly in style after WW I, it made sense to "think British" as the next stage to maximize the appeal of a hotel on the Falls.
With America maturing as a nation, coming out of WW I as an ally of Britain, the old enmity viz. John Bull that emanated from the American Revolution had subsided. Britain was now unequivocally a social and cutural model, as indeed American literature and many American social and cultural practices had long recognised, or reflected tacitly.
August Janssen, a German-American restaurateur who owned the famed Hofbrau Haus in Manhattan, did something similar on the eve of WW II in 1939. He created an old English tavern as sister-establishment to his baronial Haus. In his case, the German place continued with the other. More soon.
Note re images and quotation: The images and quotation above are from sources identified and linked in the text. Material is used for educational and historical purposes, and for fair comment. All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owners, as applicable. All feedback welcomed.
Ebon Wine of Malt
November 18, 2018 by Gary
Based on various older sources for storing beer, i.e., English ones from the mid-1800s, I occasionally do a solera-style "barrel" program where I fill a large jug with different beers and seal it for a time.
Sometimes I drink from it and top it up, especially if it is going too flat.
For the pint of beer shown, I used a full-size growler and must have had seven or eight beers in there. Some were flat but none were spoiled. One was Belgian, Chimay I think (red capsule), there was an IPA with a strong U.S. hop accent, and then some lagers and ales of various kinds. And a porter or two.
After topping up a couple of times, I left it over the summer, at room temperature, and broached it only the other day.
It was very fizzy and gushed slowly over the top even after pouring some out.
The beer was on the dry side, chocolatey with a unified savour, quite bitter, and very tasty. No acetic notes whatever, and no funky Brettanomyces taste that I could detect. Maybe there was the faintest lactic note, a fruity kind of tang.
It was absolutely superb, probably similar to some "sound old" porter stored in the vats or cisterns of the bygone London porter-brewers. I could see people drinking it as such, or blended with younger, sweeter beer.
The strong Belgian yeast notes and emphatic American hop notes were almost completely transformed by the long secondary fermentation from the cocktail of yeasts in there. The end result was just … good.
You can tell the yeasts did something unusual as the layer of cream on the beer subsisted hours after being poured (I topped it with a saucer-bottom to drink in small amounts over a couple of days). It kept a lot of fizz, too, refusing to go flat.
If I had to choose one term to describe the taste, I would say "black wine", a term used in the pre-nitrogen dispense days to describe Guinness, in fact.
For those who know Cahors, the black wine of the Lot valley, it was rather the beer equivalent, un cousin germain.
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Unibex and its Saviour
November 16, 2018 May 26, 2019 by Gary
In August 1948 the Leader Republican, a small-town newspaper in New York State, carried this wire dispatch:
Belgian Brewers Make Drive for World Trade
BRUSSELS – Belgium brewers have organised an association, "Unibex" (Union des Brasseries Belges d'Exportation), to push the sale of Belgian beer abroad. They plan to produce a standard beer of controlled density, which will keep well even in the tropics.
M. Jean Grofils, President of Unibex, speaking at a luncheon here, said Belgium had lost a large part of the export market abandoned by the Germans and Japanese, because the government had ruled after the liberation that the home market must be supplied first. As a result, he claimed, the thirsty in America and Africa were drinking Dutch beer out of Belgian bottles.
"As for the Belgian Congo," he added, "we are selling there, but we have just learned that in a little while we shall again meet a competitor, whom we had believed eliminated for a long time. I mean German beer, paid for in dollars."
M. Grosfils also complained that of 30 commercial agreements which Belgium had signed with other countries since the war, only one – that with England – contained a "drop" of beer.
It seems likely Unibex was absorbed into one of the current Belgian beer associations, maybe Belgian Brewers.
Belgian beer-makers, like their Dutch counterparts and famously Heineken and Amstel, early grasped the importance of selling beer overseas. On paper Belgium was well-poised to take advantage of the post-WW II international market. Compared to its war-damaged neighbours, Belgium was rather better off coming out of the war. According to this 1948 news report:
… Belgian losses in the war were not large. Like England, thickly-peopled, Belgium lives by foreign trade, importing raw materials and food and exporting manufactured goods. Assisted by America in particular, Belgium obtained certain raw materials soon after liberation, which enabled factories to start production. Foreign demand for goods has given Belgium the advantages of a seller's market. Coal output which affects industrial production at every turn, of course, has been remarkably stepped up by granting special financial and social welfare inducements to Belgian miners and by bringing in foreign workers. Belgium's own yield of coal is being supplemented by imports from the [German] Ruhr Valley. And the trade of the African Congo colony, much increased during the war, has a significant bearing on the well being of the Belgian motherland. Belgians are aware that the economic health of their country is closely bound up with world conditions.
Yet, as the Leader Republican explained, when Belgians contacted likely markets after WW II Dutch beer was already there and doing nicely, especially in the U.S. But even worse, an indignity was being played out in Belgium's own colony in Africa, the Congo: German brewers were looming, with U.S. money paying for their exports, only three years after the crushing defeat of 1945.
How did they do it? The money came from the ERP, or Economic Recovery Program – better known as the Marshall Plan. Under the Plan, which inaugurated in July 1948, the United States made both grants and loans to various European countries, including Belgium.
I would think either ERP funds were loaned to African buyers to guarantee payment to the German exporters, or perhaps some money was paid to brewers to help them refurbish and buy supplies. In any case, one can see that Belgium was nonplussed to find its former occupier now facing it in the commercial export arena.
(The Belgian Congo is now of course the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which gained independence in 1960).
The Unibex plan to export a standard beer of "controlled density" envisaged clearly a Heineken-like product: stable, pasteurized, a blonde lager, one ideally suited warm climates. In fact, Belgium did send such beers overseas in the 1950s.
Occasionally in U.S. retailer ads in the 1960s and 70s in the pre-craft era, examples of such beers appear. See for example this list of 1959 in the Times-Union in Albany, which included Ekla, a Belgian lager. Belgian beers, lagers and others, were also reviewed in beer books written by immediate pre-craft authors such as Michael Weiner and Jim Robertson.
Yet for some reason the Dutch, and Heineken, captured the American fancy for imported beer in this period. Various German, Canadian, and Mexican beers competed with varying degrees of success, but Belgium was not a player until relatively recently. The purchase of Anheuser-Busch to form Belgian-controlled Anheuser-Busch In Bev in particular gave an impetus to Stella Artois, but the path had been laid by the success of Belgian specialty beers from abbey beers to West Flanders red ales.
This 2011 article in the Economist outlined various factors to explain the turnaround of world affections for Belgian beer, including the consolidation impact exemplified by the international expansion of AB In Bev.
Yet, it fails to mention the most significant factor (IMO) in this development: the author Michael Jackson via a number of his books but none more important than The World Guide to Beer in 1977. The deftly-written essays and evocative photography delineating a hitherto unknown Belgian beer ethos created an avidity to know and understand these beers. Soon Jackson inspired other writers who broadened the message he first delivered.
Beers that were sourish to the taste were henceforth prized as gastronomic specialties, whereas in the 19th century, most visitors dismissed them as retrograde and anchored in primitive practices. Of numerous examples to cite, this one, from English writer W. Beatty-Kingston in 1890, will suffice.
Before Jackson, there was a scattering of articles in the U.S. press and some recognition in a couple of beer books that Belgium had a beer culture of note. See one press example here from 1964 in Camden, NY. Yet, nothing that would have blossomed into the vibrant reputation Belgium enjoys today where 70% its production is exported and adds considerably to the national balance of payments. Lisa Bradshaw reviewed the recent data in Flanders Today.
Unibex would have swooned to have that result. M. Grosfils would have found it curious too that initial success was based, not on a standard lager, but local, half-disappeared styles such as Trappist beers, lambics, Wits, and other exotica as distant from the Unibex "silver bullet" as one could imagine.
Stella Artois is of course today a growing force in the premium international lager segment, so Unibex was right in a sense, but that growth came in the wake of the romance Jackson created for Belgian beer. Without that groundwork, Belgium would be one of a number of European countries vying for sales internationally and likely well behind Germany, Denmark, and Holland with no cachet, moreover, attached to its beers.
Arguably today Belgium has trumped those other countries' reputations internationally for beer quality and interest, even Germany. Germany today is perhaps, in beer terms, the Belgium of 1948!
It proves what I've said many times: in Shelley's famous phrase, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Not just "poets" whose courage and imagination excite and change taste, but voices "unacknowledged" for their gift to humanity in the fullest sense.
Of course, Jackson was acknowledged by his peers and followers, was indeed a star in his lifetime, but I am speaking in relative terms. By 2011, the Economist could write the article it did and leave him out. Not that one can blame them really, times change, culture is altered permanently, people forget or never knew how it started.
Unibex had the right idea in 1948, but had challenges from experienced international businesspeople based in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Bremen, Munich, and Copenhagen. It needed a poet to sing the soul of beer. He or she wasn't in purview in 1948 when the imaginative and luminous of temperament were second fiddle to practical plans to restore a functioning world order.
But the saviour did finally come, in the form of Michael Jackson (1942-2007), and that is why in 1994 the Belgian state awarded to Jackson its Mercurius award for service to Belgian brewing. No less than a Crown Prince, Philippe of Belgium, now its King, presented the honour to him.
Food Fight?
Eventually most New Yorkers tire of the peacock fripperies of the gaudy cafes. There is something irritating to the true trencher man, about people who come to a restaurant to be seen more than to express a zest for food. Like that professional society party thrower who bounces from table to table, halooing across the room and otherwise trying to be the whole show! The practised gourmet studiously avoids such places. When he dines out you will find him at rendezvous rarely mentioned in society chit-chat. Dark-timbered sherry and beef havens with old prints, and perhaps a collection of steins racked around the wall. Instead of shrieking jazz, the clatter of knives and forks and the tinkle of glass. No roster of the "small hour" blades, but diners who know the cut of a steak and when a goblet of rare port or a tankard of nut brown ale are a help and not a refuge. These ancient, sturdy places keep their hold in the midst of eternal change.
The above was penned by Manhattan-based columnist O.O. McIntyre (1884-1938) in 1937, in the Endicott Daily Bulletin. McIntyre was Missouri-born and had a unique take on the Big Apple, never fully part of it, which accounted for his singular and appealing perspective.
The cultural references he is making pertain to my ongoing theme, which is the staying power of a certain idea of British eating and drinking place in North American life.
Even though in our day the steak house aka chop house goes in and out of fashion, the fundaments of what he is saying have a certain resonance. Think of the potency of the English/Irish/Scottish pub concept in the last 30 years. (To us it's all the same thing really).
The dark timbers are still there, in other words. The nut-brown ale, too – it helped spawn craft beer by god. Both are frequently mass-produced somewhere, but it doesn't really matter. It's the symbolism that counts.
Due to population changes the restaurant standbys of 2018 can include Chinese, Middle East, Thai, Italian, curry, diner. But apart from the culinary base expanding, does the true eater enjoy his/her "old reliables" more than the name chefs, the new trends, the hot addresses?
I'm not sure about the binary he puts forth. Demographic counts, for one thing. But even for his target reader, the big city "sophisticate", is what he says true? What do you think?
Obs. Note how McIntyre uses the compendious term "cafe" to describe the foreign and inauthentic in his eyes. As late as the 1940s the term still carried this connotation here.
Note re quotation: quotation above is drawn from the archived news sources identified and linked in the text (via New York State Historical newspapers). All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owner, as applicable. Used for educational and historical purposes, and fair comment. All feedback welcomed.
Britain's Most Distinguished Licensee
In the 1930s, the "English Tavern" was a gauzy image in American eyes of comfort, homeyness, and gentility, rather discordant elements, in fact, but "it worked". I'll return to this soon with examples of newly-built English Taverns in the concrete canyons and urbanized beach resorts of 1930s New York, but for now draw attention to the kind of model the Yanks had in mind.
In truth of course, the tavern, inn, taproom, call it what you will, was as old as America. After all, the British founded the principal American colonies, or took them over early as Manhattan, and provided the major cultural impetus including the English language.
The comfy resort where one could relax and sip punch, flip, cider, or ale was therefore venerable and enduring, and co-existed somehow with the more nefarious notions of saloon and cocktail bar. This benign image never left the folk memory, but was less potent in certain periods.
In the late-1800s as I discussed recently, news coverage of English and American taverns tempered the old affection with more realism on the tavern's dangers. This was the result of a long process of temperance campaigning, so that alcohol's role in society changed to a kind of conditional status.
I'll review soon as well perspectives of the English pub in another period, the years leading up to WW I – height of prohibitionist sentiment. The Gothenburg experiment came in for a close look, as did schemes in Britain favouring alcohol-free pubs.
By the 1930s though, the English inn/hostelry/tavern/alehouse (all confounded happily in the American mind) rebounded in prestige. Suddenly, English taverns were everywhere, in the major cities, in the basements of plush suburban homes.
The fashion was rivalled perhaps only by the Irish pub craze of the last 30 years.
Stories in the press burnished and consecrated the old image, and what better model than "Britain's most distinguished licensee". She was no less a Prime Minister's socially prominent daughter, Ishbel MacDonald.
This Pathe clip explains crisply what she did – she bought an inn in Speen, Buckinghamshire, The Plow, and married a local villager to boot.
He died 15 years later and she remarried. Sadly, the second husband died only three years after. MacDonald finally returned to Scotland, passing away in 1982.
By all reports she was a remarkable woman, and must indeed have been the perfect pub landlady. Her mother had died young and Ishbel became chatelaine for her father, honing what seems innate social skills to the max. She had the personal touch long before the current crop of commoners who married into royalty.
This 1938 press story in the Philadelphia Inquirer dished the details of running the pub and marrying Norman Ridgely. It dazzled American readers with an upstairs-downstairs scenario. Villagers fretted that Ishbel's "breeding" would alter the tone of Saturday nights in the pub, but were converted by her winning manner.
In fact, Ramsay MacDonald was born to humble origins, which he overcame in social terms but not materially. Ishbel's management skills as publican/hotelier in part came from savvy economizing as hostess at 10 Downing Street, as Ramsay had no independent fortune to spend.
The Plow endured for years after Ishbel retired to the MacDonald seat in Lossiemouth. In the last generation the pub functioned mainly as a stylish restaurant, serving a chic clientèle in the Chilterns. Today it is a private residence.
The image shown above is from a second Pathe clip, picturing the good-looking hostess with handsome townsman Ridgley.
Note re image: Image above was sourced as noted and linked in the text. All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owner, as applicable. Image used for educational and historical purposes, and for fair comment. All feedback welcomed.
The Butter Tarts of Ginger Farm
The "Ginger Farm Special"
What is or was Ginger Farm? And wherefore its butter tart?
Ginger Farm today lies under tons of concrete, asphalt, and steel. From 1924-1958 it was a working farm near Milton, ON. Milton is about a 50-minute drive west of Toronto along Highway 401, the broad ribbon vital to Ontario commerce. From Milton you can wend to Guelph, Cambridge, Kitchener, London, Chatham, and finally Windsor just before the bridge to Detroit.
In the late 1950s when the "401" was being planned, 100-acre Ginger Farm was expropriated by the Ontario government. Part of it now lies under a clover-leaf linking Highways 25 and 401. The other part sits under the Maplehurst Correctional Facility, a prison built in the early 1970s (known to initiates I hear as the Milton Hilton).
Ginger Farm, as the 2009 book Chronicles of Ginger Farm explains, was owned by Lancelot and Gwendoline Clarke, a couple who purchased it in 1924. Gwendoline, nee Fitz-Gerald, was born in Sudbury, Suffolk (England). She married Lancelot in England while he was on leave from the Canadian Army.
Lancelot was also from Suffolk but had emigrated to Canada in his teens. He worked in farming near Milton and held other occupations before returning to Britain with the army.
Once arrived in Canada Gwendoline and Lancelot went out west to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to try farming. After some years they moved with their two children to Ontario and purchased the plot near Milton, where they remained for life. Gwendoline died in 1966.
In her spare time Gwendoline authored a great many newspaper columns on farm and rural life in Ontario, called "Chronicles of Ginger Farm". David Mitchell-Evans, a grandchild of the Clarkes, collected many of these for the book Chronicles.
The farm was dubbed ginger not because the plant was cultivated there, but for reasons that combine whimsy, a literary sense, and knowledge of life's hard knocks.
As set out in Chronicles, Gwendoline explained in 1929:
…let me tell you, right here and now, in case there are any who don't know it, that besides brain and brawn, it requires ginger of the highest quality and spiciest order to come anywhere near success [in farming], and the smaller the capital, the more ginger required.
It is a sign of how much society has changed that "ginger" in this sense sounds old-fashioned.
Gwendoline and Ginger Farm became well-known in Ontario via her regular column. It appeared in nearby Acton's Free Press and was reprinted in other newspapers in Ontario.
Her writing also appeared in England, perhaps through the Women's Institute, of which she was a member via its Scotch Block chapter.
Many columns were reprinted in The Flesherton Advance, a newspaper in the Grey Highlands region. Flesherton is a 2.5-3 hour drive north of Toronto. Gwendoline's writing in the Advance covered the war years, describing the challenges of rising retail prices and falling crop revenues. She also recounted shortages of staples such as fruits, nuts, tobacco, and coffee.
Her writing limns daily occurrences – raising crops, calving and other livestock management, the change of the seasons, and always the weather factor. Occasionally attractions were sought nearby, usually a movie.
Gwendoline showed a lively and intuitive intelligence, always practical but with a questing bent, as seen by her interest in the past, or desire to read more than time afforded her. In fact, she wrote on local history in separate publications. She was perceptive about both animal and human natures, and in general expressed a live-and-let-live philosophy.
The Special Butter Tart
In a 1941 column she describes a makeshift butter tart she made. Due to wartime conditions "currants and raisins" were not available to add to the basic egg/sugar/butter filling. So she hit on adding mincemeat, meaning of course the sweetened, preserved fruit mixture laid down from time immemorial for Christmas.
It proved a clear success, to the point her taciturn husband, always dubbed "Partner", was moved to praise its qualities albeit "not solicited".
Gwendoline starts by explaining that generally she doesn't do recipes, to use our 2018 vernacular. There is a mild sense of dismissal, I think, for more leisured women who have time to ponder and compile recipes.
As a busy farm-wife proudly asserting her role in running a parlous communal business, she had little time for what she possibly viewed as a (relative) frivolity. Still, this dish was so good she had to pass it on.
When writing recently of butter tarts history, I concluded the U.K. butter and border tarts seem more complex in construction than our Canadian butter tarts. Similar ingredients are used, but more of them in one recipe than we do. See for example this U.K. website's (Mary Mary Quite Contrary's) recipe for the Ecclefechan butter tart.
Our butter tarts typically contain walnut, pecan, raisins, or currants (or none of these), but rarely all of them, or three, or even two together. And rarely or never have I seen glacé cherry or candied citrus, whereas the U.K. analogues often feature them.
(I'm endeavouring to describe what one might expect in the classic tradition).
Maybe the multi-fruit explosion of a mincemeat-goosed butter tart reminded the Clarkes of their younger days in England, eating similar-tasting pies at festivities.
Gwendoline Clarke expressed the wish that her version, should it find general approval, be known as the Ginger Farm Special. This never happened as far as I know, but it's not too late. Let's spread the word for what sounds a fine dessert, and one with an engaging backstory.* I haven't tried the recipe but I don't doubt the Clarkes are good guides.
Readers of a cookery bent: fetch up the mincemeat and give it a try, especially with Noel not distant. If enough do, the toothsome phoenix will rise again.**
Note re images and quotation: The first image is in the public domain and appears in the Wikipedia entry for Milton, ON, here. The second image is drawn from the 1941 article in the Flesherton Advance linked in the text. The quotation is from the book Chronicles of Ginger Farm (2009, published by Bastian Publishing) as identified and linked in the text (via Google Books). All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owners, as applicable. Said material is used for educational and historical purposes, and for fair comment. All feedback welcomed.
*The mincemeat-butter tarts recipe is not mentioned in the 2009 Chronicles book.
**It may be noted also that Gwendoline's butter tart is a whole pie, not baked in tartlets that is. See in our previous post, under "Proximate Origins of the Canadian Butter Tart", my discussion of the shape issue. In addition, as mincemeat frequently contains candied ginger, the Ginger Farm Special can be said plausibly to contain ginger, notwithstanding that the plant was not the reason for the farm's name. This entry finally of real ginger to a product of Ginger Farm must have pleased Gwendoline secretly.
Butter Tarts in North America
November 6, 2018 December 16, 2019 by Gary
[Note added October 19, 2019: The original version of this post was published on November 6, 2018. The text as it appears below reflects edits made to November 29, 2018. An expanded, fully referenced version has now been published in the U.K.-based (English-language) journal, Petits Propos Culinaires, issue #114, June 2019. The journal, edited by British food authority Tom Jaine, is not available online but copies may be purchased from PPC's office. For all details, see the publisher's website, prospectbooks.co.uk].
Below, I discuss both the Canadian and U.S. histories pertaining to the butter tart.*
To my knowledge, the U.S. history has not been previously canvassed. While I have utilized many sources, the U.S. references were selected mainly from digitized, historical archives of northeast U.S. newspapers. Despite the regional tilt, I believe my survey and conclusions have more general application.
In addition, this tour d'horizon provides an interesting "compare and contrast" with Canadian butter tart history.
Summary of Canadian History
The Canadian history has been discussed in general and specialist culinary books, articles, papers, encyclopedias, and blogs. The relevant earlier sources are spread among a number of these resources from our survey.
This account written by the County of Simcoe, Ontario explains well that a "filling for tarts" recipe appeared in the Royal Victoria Cook Book published in Barrie in 1900 by the Royal Victoria Hospital's Woman's Auxiliary. The recipe was contributed by a Mrs. Malcolm MacLeod of that city. Her own first name was Mary, all as explained in the link. She did not employ the term butter tarts, but her recipe is clearly that, sans the name.
Her filling of sugar, eggs, butter, and currants baked in pastry shells makes a classic Canadian butter tart albeit countless variations exist. Some use vinegar or lemon juice, some add nuts of some kind, the sucrose content can be from different types of sugars and syrups, and vanilla or other flavouring can be added.
A Toronto "Breakfast TV" journalist recreated this Ur-recipe earlier this year. The result (efficiently produced by the unflappable chef!) is clearly the modern butter tart, as earlier researchers have attested. Still, Mary MacLeod did not use the name.
Which is the first print source to do so?
It may be the Vogue Cook Book, which you can read here in fully digitized form. It was published by The News, an evening Toronto newspaper. See pp. 91 and 105 for two butter tart recipes.
Although a copyright or publication year is not stated in the book, the publication month and year are December 1908 according to the analysis of bibliographer Elizabeth Driver in her 2008 Culinary Landmarks: a Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825-1949, see here.
The recipe contributed by "Mrs. G.M.B." in Toronto is often cited as influential as it sets out, like the 1900 Barrie recipe, the "core" recipe used to this day. The other, from "Clarice" in Plattsville, ON seems eccentric at least in retrospect. Her filling has no egg and a lump of butter is placed over a dry mixture of flour and sugar before baking (a clue to another possible derivation of "butter" in butter tart?).
Still, both recipes use similar albeit not identical ingredients, and both are baked dishes.
A "sugar tarts" recipe from the same Clarice appears on the same page. In effect it is a butterscotch tart, different from the typical butter tart in that the filling, otherwise similar to the other's, is boiled on the stove and poured into baked shells to cool; there is no baking in the shells. I will revisit this form of tart below in connection with similar American and Canadian versions, some of which are termed butter tarts.
Further, in the undated, second edition of The Beaver Valley Collection of Latest and Best Recipes that appeared sometime between 1907 (first edition) and 1912 (third edition), a Mrs. S. Hooey contributed a recipe for butter tarts. See again E. Driver's discussion, here.
It is unclear which book holds precedence since the second edition of The Beaver Valley book could have been published before December 1908, although given that the third edition appeared in 1912, it seems more probable the second edition of Beaver Valley appeared after the Vogue Cook Book.
In any case, both are key early texts appearing about the same time. Taken too with the earlier Barrie recipe, E. Driver's statement that Ontario butter tarts emerged at the turn of the century seems reasonable.
Of course usage was likely older on an oral or unpublished basis, as frequently occurs before someone thinks to write down a recipe.
Next, there is the Canadian Farm Cook Book published in 1911, which set out six recipes seriatum. Each uses sugar, egg, and butter for the filling, and all but one adds currants, a common ingredient in modern butter tarts.
All are from different centres in Ontario. You can read them in the fully-digitized Canadian Farm Cook Book, here.
The Five Roses Cookbook, of which the first two editions appeared in 1913 and 1915, published by an industrial miller on Lake of the Woods, also contains a butter tart recipe. See, in the digitized 1915 edition, pg. 79. This book helped popularize the dish nationally due to the book's cross-country distribution. This recent article by Julie Van Rosendaal in Toronto's The Globe and Mail offers useful background in this regard.
Canadian food authority Elizabeth Baird sets out a recipe for butter tarts on the website of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, here, adapted from the 1913 edition. This version blends some maple syrup in and uses chips of walnut.
After WW I the dish became a mainstay of Ontario baking and, if not a quite a national Canadian specialty, something rather more than just an Ontario one.
Proximate Origins of the Canadian Butter Tart
As some food writers concur, the Scots Ecclefechan butter tart, aka the Ecclefechan tart, and their boon companion the Border tart, are surely the immediate ancestors to Canada's butter tart.
Some observers however take a different, or at least more nuanced, view of origin, suggesting for example that Quebec's sugar pie has had some influence on Ontario's butter tart.
Caitlin Coleman of Toronto studied aspects of butter tart history in 2009 while in graduate studies at University of Toronto. In a personal communication to us recently she made the interesting point that vinegar pie, while likely not a direct predecessor of butter tarts, may have influenced butter tarts given vinegar is a frequent ingredient and may be a leftover element from that forgotten dessert. (We thank members of the Culinary Historians of Canada (CHC) and Ms. Coleman for providing information on a presentation she made on butter tarts in 2009 to a CHC conference that honoured the work of Canadian cookbook bibliographer Elizabeth Driver).
For the two U.K. types butter seems a constant in the doughs. The fillings usually share a base of eggs, sugar or other sweetening, and butter, with various dried fruits or nuts added for a relish. An acid element seems optional (vinegar, lemon juice), ditto for a spice such as cinnamon.
The Scots cookery authority Catherine Brown gives a recipe for Ecclefechan's tart in her 2011 book Classic Scots Cookery, here. She also describes the Border tart and states the Ecclefechan butter tart is a variation.
These British forms are known it seems primarily in Scotland but also parts of England. A 1937 recipe in the Australian newspaper Truth for "Old English Butter Tarts" is similar to Ecclefechan's but more simplified. This modern English butter tarts recipe, from the All Recipes site, is similar to the Australian, and both resemble the Ontario one closely. Further below we cite similar tarts in the U.S., described as English or Welsh, going back to the mid-1900s and possibly earlier.
The line (sorry!) between Border tart and Ecclefechan butter tart seems vague. The London Eats site attempts to draw it, while stating with self-deprecation that the attempt is questionable. The Border tart seems often iced, while the other is not usually although a touch of meringue may be added, or whipped cream as Ms. Brown advises. And the Ecclefechan can, as London Eats confirms, be in tartlet shape while the Border tart seems rarely to be so.
The shortcrust of the Border tart – it seems typically a shortcrust – often incorporates almonds. The Ecclefechan generally does not, in line with practice in Ontario.
In general, both Border and Ecclefechan tarts when compared to the 1857 description of butter tart mentioned below (in turn it references a 1709 recipe) reflect the same kind of dish: a pastry meant to hold an egg-enriched sugar and butter blend further enhanced with nuts or preserved fruit. This goes some way in our view to showing the butter tart – that terminology – came first.
By virtue of using typically both nuts and fruit, and mixed fruit at that, the Ecclefechan tart seems "busier" than the typical butter tart of Canada. Many Ecclefechan recipes also describe a flattish, flan-shape. The commonly used shortcrust for this has a different texture than some Canadian butter tarts that employ a shortbread crust (cookie-style).
But Ecclefechan tarts are also made in small, "tartlet" quantities, where the result looks very close to Ontario's. See e.g. here, from the All Recipes site again, or the Walker's commercial line of boxed Ecclefechan tarts. And pastry shells would have varied in composition surely (pie crust, shortbread, etc.) depending on the family, local practice, and quality; at least in Canada that has occurred and we suspect no less in Scotland.
The 1937 Australian example calls for using a "patty tin", which produces small tarts via the rounded or fluted indentations. Occasionally too in Canada whole pies, or square pies, are made that otherwise use standard butter tart ingredients. This Alberta recipe for a pan of square butter tarts, from the site "A Pretty Life in the Suburbs", uses a shortbread crust instead of the typical pie crust. Many Toronto bakers sell a form of square butter tart, as well.
Another recipe for the Ecclefechan tart, sourced by U.K. travel author Bruce Stannard from a noted hotel, is similar to Ms. Brown's except using the tartlet shape.
Hence, shape or size are not of themselves a reliable demarcation between the U.K. and Canadian butter tarts, and neither is crust type in our view.
The attractive "Cook's Info" culinary site, in useful historical notes, argues that our butter tart and American pecan pie both derive from the U.K. butter tart. It further makes the point that some examples of the Scots and Canadian traditions are indistinguishable, which to my mind is decisive.
There is yet more. A strong Scottish and English emigration to Ontario followed the initial influx of American Loyalists, including to Barrie. And the surnames MacLeod and Hooey seem Scots or at least Gaelic.
The British influence on the Ontario butter tart seems inevitable even as the latter represents a particularly toothsome form.
A New Idea Regarding the Ultimate Origins of the U.K. Butter and Border Tarts
In preliminary notes in 2016 I discussed the entry for "butter-tart" in the Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English by Thomas Wright, first edition issued in 1857. Wright cited The Queen's Royal Cookery's recipe for butter-tart, which dates from 1709 per this British Library notation.
The author was T. Hall, described on the frontispiece as a "free London cook". In the second edition of Hall's book issued in 1713, see the digitized copy in the Library of Congress collection, here, the recipe as Wright described it appears at pg. 140, save that it is termed simply Butter Tart (no hyphen):
The "mackrooms" mentioned are macaroons in our view (not macarons), which were made with almonds, egg, and sugar, and later sometimes coconut. A modern Border tart from the artisan bakery Alex Dalgetty in the Scots Border country claims its recipe is the original form. See the photograph included, the tart features a double-crusted, "sponge" filling of sugar, almond and coconut.
It is remarkably similar to T. Hall's recipe above, and an example of living history.
We have not been able to trace a butter tart before Hall although he was known to have liberally borrowed some recipes from other books, as common at the time.
The recipe advised to "bard" with "paste" (pastry) a filling composed in the main of beaten egg, mackrooms, and butter, so that the tart is not open-face in other words.
Despite no prior citations to our knowledge, the recipe appears to us older than c.1700, perhaps Middle Ages or earlier, and is in any case recognizable as an ancestor of the modern butter tart, albeit more elaborate, given too of course it bears the name. The sugar component of the macaroons would have sweetened the filling – perhaps honey was used in some cases – and the nutty taste of the almonds continued in the frequent use of nuts in the later U.K. and Ontario butter tarts.
The fact that Wright referenced the butter tart in 1857 is not simply a surplus later citation, as it shows perhaps the term was in use in his day as a provincialism – one of the provinces of his book, so to speak.
If in use in Wright's day, it reinforces a direct U.K. lineage for Ontario's butter tart.
I hypothesize that at least from Queen Anne's time, but probably earlier, cooks called a tart "barded" where a top layer of pastry was used, and by corruption of pronunciation over time, barded became butter and Border in tarts so named, even though the double-layer of pastry was finally dispensed with. The suggestion is novel to my knowledge, but warrants at a minimum further consideration.
A theory current in food history circles for some years is that U.K. butter tarts and the similar Border tarts originated in the Borders country that straddles the boundary of Scotland and England, and that butter is a corruption of Border, as butter is no more important in these tarts than in much other confectionary. This of course could take in Hall's butter tart.
This theory is attractive, but all avenues need further exploration to aim at more conclusiveness on the questions.
For example, unlike for the butter tart, it appears there is no documentation for the Border tart before 1900, which suggests to me the butter tart came first and inspired the other, presumably by corruption of the distinguishing term. That the dish survived better, it appears, in the Borders country may be the happy coincidence of the geographical name suggesting a connection.
United States References to Butter Tarts – General
It turns out there is a great number of references in the U.S. press to butter tarts, some of which precede the first Canadian citations.
I consider below a representative number, and whether these tarts are the same as the Canadian one. In brief, many clearly are not, some clearly are but were borrowed from Canada due to cross-border contact, and others are more ambiguous. It is likely the same kind of tart as in Canada existed episodically in the U.S., but directly from a U.K. influence.
References to Butter Torte and Butter Tart in that connection
What is a butter torte, and why is it relevant to this discussion? A butter torte, sometimes called buttercream torte, is a German or Central European cake, generally multiple layers interleaved with buttercream or another butter-and-sugar-based filling. The Canadian website Dairy Goodness offers a good recipe for a mocha version.
A butter torte was also sometimes a puff pastry-based confection in which a fruit filling provided a signature flavour.
For good historical background on the German and Austrian tortes, see Michael Krondl at pp. 280-283 of his 2011 Sweet Inventions: a History of Dessert.
The United States Cookbook by William Vollmer was published in numerous editions in Philadelphia including in 1865. It was reissued in 1893, and you can read a number of butter torte/butter tart recipes in that version, i.e., appearing alternately in German and English.
Vollmer wrote the book in German and a translator (see title page) rendered each page successively in English. That is, the English version of butter torte is rendered as butter tart.
See Vollmer's recipes for these at pp. 149-150, here. The fruits specified included apple, raspberry, and currants. In other words: a simple fruit-filled tart known to a number of European cuisines and popularized internationally early.
In Jessup Whitehead's seventh edition (1894) of his The American Pastry Cook, no reference can be found to the butter torte or butter tart. Whiteheads' book was directed in part (see title page) to commercial bakeries.
This suggests Vollmer's version, as his original German text implies, was ethnic in character, not a mainstream type of food.
While clearly different from the British and Canadian butter tarts we mention Vollmer's "faux" 19th-century version, since subsequent U.S. news ads for "butter tarts" may in some cases be this German specialty, the cake or fruit-in-puff paste tart, especially where German immigrants were the bakers.
Reference to Butter Tart in a French Norman Context
In 1889 a short fictional story appeared in New York's The Epoch, a topical magazine and journal. It was called "The Uncle From America", adapted from the French of Emil Souvestre by Isabel Smithson. It states that a "butter-tart" was served to a long-absent uncle visiting relations in Normandy, somewhere near Dieppe. Cider accompanied a sumptuous repast in which the tart figured.
It is clear from the context that this is some type of French pastry tart, probably "au beurre", even as we cannot trace a contemporary Norman or other French one called "tarte au beurre". The term clearly has nothing to do with the British and Canadian butter tarts, but I mention it for completeness, especially as the story, a homily, was reprinted many times in the U.S. press. (The uncle is welcomed, as a presumably rich benefactor-to-be, with the best hospitality the hosts can muster, when it turns out he is without resources, however it all ends well).
The Butterscotch Tart
On July 21, 1914 in the Brooklyn, NY Daily Star, a recipe appeared for "butter tarts":
One egg, one cup of granulated sugar, butter size of an egg, one-fourth cup of milk, one cup currants. Put all ingredients together and boil until like soft custard: flavor and cool. When cool, put in tart shells and serve.
This recipe appeared the same year in different parts of the northeast, including in Buffalo, NY. In a recipe in the Brooklyn Daily Star in April 1914 for the same butter tart, it was attributed to the Los Angeles Express. This dish, while using similar ingredients to the ordinary butter tart, clearly is a different confection – the different cooking treatment ensures that – yet the fact of sharing the same name with the more familiar butter tart suggests a relationship.
Perhaps the Canadian and U.K. butter tarts were all prepared originally as a butterscotch tart still is, before ovens became common household equipment.
In Flesherton, ON's The Flesherton Advance on January 6, 1937 two recipes for butter tarts appeared, the classic baked one, and a second similar to the boiled version above but sans the egg. The second was contributed by a resident of Delia, Alberta, the first was local.
Modern recipes for butterscotch tart are easy to find on both sides of the Atlantic, here is one from Nigella Lawson's website.
Perhaps at some point the butter tart term for simplicity and clarity became associated with the baked butter tart, while the other is called now exclusively butterscotch tart. A search of these respective terms seems to confirm this, but it remains a matter of impression.
I don't think the butterscotch tarts of America were influenced by the butter tart of Canada, they are too dispersed geographically for that and are documented at about the same time the Canadian butter tart emerged. Why the baked version did not become as popular in the U.S. as Canada is hard to say. I suppose, to mix metaphors, the Americans had other fish to fry.
References to Butter Tarts in Niagara Frontier that Salute Canadian Influence
Throughout the mid- and later-20th century, many recipes for a Canadian-style butter tart appear in Buffalo, NY newspapers or elsewhere in what Empire State residents call, or used to, the Niagara Frontier. Many of these acknowledge Canadian influence, as this one of September 29, 1959 in the Buffalo Courier-Express (it has an interesting feature of a teaspoon of instant coffee).
Others are not attributed this way, but can be presumed to have been inspired by cross-border contact. I say this due not just to the proximity of that part of New York to Ontario, but the fact that baked butter tart recipes appear not to have proliferated in the state until after they became well-established in Ontario.
At the same time, other references to butter tarts in New York's press, and outside New York, cannot be so easily explained.
U.S. References to Butter Tarts That are Arguably Ambiguous
Consider a 1962 article from the (American) Niagara Falls Gazette, in which the following appears:
Mrs. Stewart makes elaborate preparations for holiday festivities and has an imposing array of Welsh desserts. Clockwise are her Teisen Lychwan or Welsh cakes; Bara Brith, (fruit bread); English Trifle; and a platter of butter tarts, lemon tarts and small fruit cakes in paper cups. Her plum pudding, topped with holly, is in the center.
The very clear photo shows Mrs. Stewart in traditional Welsh costume and her array of treats mentioned. The butter tarts look just like ours. Yet there is no reference to Canada, they are described, evidently via Mrs. Stewart, as Welsh as for the other foods. Could it be she discovered the butter tarts across the bridge, and simply assumed (correctly) they had a distant Britannic inspiration, and just called them Welsh from convenience?
It's possible. I cannot find an example in current culinary literature of a Welsh butter tart or border tart. Interestingly, a 2011 detective book called A Killer's Christmas in Wales written by Elizabeth Duncan, part of her Penny Brannigan series, includes a reference to "brandy butter tarts", but Elizabeth Duncan is Canadian! Perhaps though she did notice such tarts in a Welsh bakery at one point.
In The Hamburg Sun in May 1963, a bake sale for the Unitarian Church offered "'Molly Jones' English butter tarts":
Home baked goods will feature fruit breads, home baked beans and brown bread, coffee cakes, home made bread, "Molly Jones" English butter tarts and cookies.
Hamburg is just west of Buffalo, not far again from Canada. A similar example, with recipe, in 1929 in more distant Schenectady, NY is called simply English Tart, and virtually identical to the basic butter tart recipe of Ontario.
There is no reference to Canada, or details of the Molly Jones, for Hamburg's butter tart. Butter tarts can indeed be English as we know, so could these dishes, as perhaps Mrs. Stewart's, have entered the local baking scene directly via a U.K. influence? We think this rather likely.
In 1958, an American who married a man of Scottish background made "Scotch butter tarts", see this interesting account in the Buffalo Courier-Express.
She states she got the small metal tins from "commercial" examples of butter tarts sold in Canada – all Ontarians reading know those tins! – but otherwise the cultural reference here is Scotland, no differently than for the other Scots dishes she made for her family.
Her recipe (partly obscured by the shield of the uploader) appears to be the Ecclefechan/Ontario type. The only difference I see is cake crumbs are used to bulk out the filling. A vestige of the crumbly filling in T. Hall's 1709/1713 recipe…?
In January 1950 in the Wilton Bulletin in Wilton, CT, rather remote from the Niagara Frontier, a Beata Fortune advertises "butter tarts", Britannic-sounding shortbread, and brandy snaps: no apparent German connection.
See also this Mississippi survival of butter tarts, presumably implanted long ago by Scots-Irish or Scots settlers.
All this to say, the butter tart of the U.K. almost certainly has had a long implantation in the U.S. for which Canada cannot be credited. Unlike Canada though, the dish never flourished there, never became marked for culinary distinction as one might say for apple pie, or the milkshake.
U.S. Butter Tarts Advertisements Circa-1900 and More Recently, in Greenfield, MA
One of the most interesting cases concerns Charles Voetsch, a German immigrant baker from Thuringen. He came to Greenfield, MA, in the north of the state, an area certainly well-insulated from Canada. This 1909 sketch of his career in the Greenfield Recorder explains he came in 1896, set up a bakery, and sold it in 1909 after 13 successful years in business.
He had numerous ads in the Greenfield Recorder that included butter tarts. They appeared between 1900 and 1908 with (in different combinations) eclairs, Charlotte Russe, cream puffs, whipped cream cakes, and frozen pudding as companion offerings. These are vaguely French or Anglo-American-type preparations, not really typical of German or Viennese baking.
The earliest ad I found, via the Fulton Historical Newspapers archive as for most of the news references herein, is from December 5, 1900:
I suspect similar Voetsch ads appeared before 1900 but the archives mentioned appear to start in 1900 for this newspaper.
Was this a Scots-style butter tart, implanted in Greenfield in a fashion similar to its (presumed) implantation in Ontario? Or was it perhaps the German fruit-laced puff pastry William Vollmer wrote about both in German and English and a successful (German-American) baker such as Voetsch can be presumed to have known about?
We cannot say, except that the item was popular enough to have appeared in numerous ads by his bakery in the same paper mentioned. Here is one more, from December 14, 1904.
Holtermann's is a surviving family bakery in Staten Island, NY, founded by a German ancestor in the late-1800s who must have been much like Voetsch. The Holtermann website describes numerous specialties that were also advertised by Voetsch in the early 1900s, and more modern ones, but not butter tarts. Perhaps Holtermann carried them in 1900.
Let's return to modern Greenfield, MA, though. Foster's, a family-owned supermarket in the city founded in 1941, may still sell butter tarts as the current website includes an image of a butter tart, the pecan-type familiar to Ontarians, with accompanying recipe (the Scots-Canadian type).
A legend under the image states the latter originated with a canola oil manufacturer, so the image and perhaps the recipe may not represent any butter tarts currently sold by Foster's, or may not represent the type it sold earlier in the 1900s (see below). Foster's current bakery product list, here, does not reference butter tarts, so we are unclear if any are still sold. It appears the bakery list was recently changed as earlier this month when we first examined it, butter tarts were listed.
In a 1988 Foster's supermarket ad, butter tarts were clearly available. The ad was placed in the same newspaper in which Voetsch advertised his butter tarts three generations earlier:
This ad supplies a possible clue that what Voetsch sold c.1900 was the fruited, German puff-pastry version. One way to interpret the ad is two types of butter tart are sold, a raspberry one and pecan one. I suppose one can argue that it meant, raspberry tart, pecan tart, and butter tart, three types all different, in which case it is still an open question what "butter tart" meant.
A raspberry, Ontario-style butter tart sounds atypical to say the least. Such a Greenfield butter tart (if it is that) has a hint of William Vollmer, and perhaps too shows what Voetsch sold under that name. A puff pastry flavoured with pecan is also still current, a quick search discloses many recipes.
Other Early-1900s U.S. Bakery Ads for Butter Tarts Outside Upstate New York
The Voetsch butter tart was probably similar to some butter tarts advertised in the same era elsewhere in the northeast (at least). On September 24, 1901 in Wilmington, Del., a deluxe grocery store, Hanscom's, sold butter tarts together with vanilla jumble and marshmallow and jam sandwiches, for one price by the pound.
The jumble was a type of cookie, and the "sandwiches" perhaps were like the dome-shaped, chocolate-coated jam and marshmallow cookies still sold today. All these items seemingly formed an assortment, see the wording of the ad.
The Philadelphia Inquirer on August 2, 1904 advertised butter tarts as part of an assortment that included "diamond figs, [n?]ice assorted fruits, pineapple turnovers, and cocoanut combination bars":
The grocery store Siegel Cooper in New York, in the World on May 28, 1906, advertised butter tarts in an assortment that also featured a fruit sandwich, vanilla jelly, and date fingers. See here another example from the same retailer earlier in the same month.
A newspaper ad by the Star Bakery in Michigan on April 7, 1917 offered butter tarts along with cream puffs and angel food cake – seemingly no German context.
(In Toronto today, some grocery stores sell an in-house biscuit tray that may be similar to these assortments. Here is an example from Longo's, and it includes clearly butter tarts, the usual Ontario type of course. These are smaller than usual-size, for "two-bites").
And so, which tart in these cases? The Scots butter tart? The German fruited one? The butterscotch tart? Maybe sometimes it was one or another although we incline it may well have been the Scots type, given grocery assortments of biscuits are still sold, at least in Toronto, that contain "our" butter tart.
An Ontario influence would seem too early for the cases mentioned between 1901 and 1906 but the Michigan case may be different, as the town in question, Crystal Falls, is just below Lake Superior. Perhaps by 1917 the Five Roses Cookbook had penetrated there given ship navigation around the Great Lakes.
The butter tart is deservedly Ontario's pet snack, a word that seems too derisory to describe it at its best. Its distinction comes from the few ingredients used vs. a more complex (in general) construction overseas; the purity and full flavour are best expressed in the simple way we make it. Anyway, we perfected it.
At the same time, the butter tart has had an American career. In some cases it was our's transplanted, in others it was Scotland's or Albion's brought direct to the U.S. but never becoming a thing there as it did here. Yet in other cases, it was a German-type butter torte or indeed Britannic but the line of confections known as the butterscotch tart, which at bottom is a different pastry.
Canadian entrepreneurs have attempted periodically to introduce butter tarts to Americans. The actress Suzanne Sommers and her Canadian-born husband tried a few decades ago but it didn't work.** An entrepreneur, Asher Weiss, is currently trying in New York as reported in the city's Daily News, and we wish him well.*** The headline stated butter tarts have "arrive[d] in New York". But not for the first time.
Note re images: the images and quotations above are all drawn from sources identified and linked in the text. All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owners, as applicable. Images used for educational and historical purposes, and for fair comment. All feedback welcomed.
[See also our post following on the Ginger Farm Butter Tart].
*All consideration of apple butter tarts, made that is with the product apple butter, and lemon or orange butter tarts, has been excluded as the dominance of the fresh fruit flavour seems to take these out of the basic Scots-Anglo-Canadian butter tart family. The peanut butter, or peanut butter-and-chocolate, tart likewise seems of a different order to us. Incidentally, chocolate butter tarts simpliciter are quite popular in Ontario now but we think these quite wrongheaded – I've never had one that seems "right". Our preference in classic butter tarts is the plain Jane type, or with currants. More is superfluous and can detract from the purity and intensity of taste.
**The investment was referred to in this L.A. Times obituary of their business partner, Mr. A. J. Maxwell.
***See his company's lively website, Btarts, here.
The English pub in 1886
November 4, 2018 November 5, 2018 by Gary
In the Pubs the Pundits Come and Go, Talking of …
A compact, 1886 portrait of the English public house appeared in numerous American newspapers, including this one in Owego, NY. The piece is credited to the London correspondent of the Chicago Herald and was evidently syndicated.
There is a great deal more sociability in the English public house than in the American sample room. In the lanes and side streets of the fashionable part of London may be found the same character of old-fashioned public as in the city. Every one of these has its regular customers, and its " snuggery" in the evening is generally full of its patrons who are, for the most part, the coachman, grooms, and "gentlemen's gentlemen," otherwise valets of the "classes" who reside in the neighboring Belgravia. Here the Jeameses canvass the characters of their various lords, and ladies, and more true scandal is talked in these public house snuggeries than in any of their ladies' boudoirs.
The village public is quite an institution by itself, and is as distinct in character from its London brother as chalk is from cheese. Here the landlord still retains some of the qualities and bearings of "mine host" of former days. The public is the headquarters of the political lights of the village, and doctor, lawyer and farmer meet together in the snuggery to discuss the merits of a popular race horse or a popular statesman just as frequently now as they did in days gone by. The railroad and telegraph have had wonderfully little effect in some of the rural parts of England, and Hodge, in the village public, is just as densely ignorant of anything that goes on beyond his own immediate kin as ever he was. To him "t'sqoir" and the "big house" are the epitomes of all that is great and noble, and the opinions of the lord of the manor give a coloring to everything discussed in the "snuggery."
The interesting term sample room for bar or saloon may have a Windy City origin – how apposite – and is explained in this entry of the online Encyclopedia of Chicago History.
Some condescension apart, The Chicago Herald usefully sketches the Victorian pub including the distinction between village and urban versions.
The country pub retained vestiges of an earlier time, when deference was paid to local notables. These could include the landlord himself as we saw in this posting.
Here, the high-ranking still exercised a powerful hold on the pub denizens. This was not just from tradition and habit I think, but the likelihood the squire held the freehold in the pub, or employed part of the village in some way.
In the country, professional classes might frequent the snug in the pub to socialize. In Belgravia, one of the best parts of London then or now, that aerie was used by the retinues of gentry and other monied people.
Those who know The Star Tavern in Belgrave Mews, Belgravia can imagine it was exactly the kind of place described by the Herald for that quarter.
The snug, or snug-room, or snuggery, was a small chamber closed off in some way from the main bar, sometimes with frosted glass. It tended to house women, or prominent persons of some kind or be used for official purposes (inquests, vote-count).
Victorian pubs in tony districts could evidently see the snugs dominated by elite employees of prominent families or other poo-bahs. I can't thing off-hand of the right sociological term for this but I'm sure some readers can. (Inverted something or other?).
All in all, not much has changed seemingly in terms of how the English pubs are used, after work, for chatting and down-time, with each having its regulars, etc.
It's as if life has gone on in the pub for hundreds of years more or less autonymously while the social scientists, writers and artists, and journalists who study them assiduously, come and go.
With apologies to Eliot, the mermaids sing, each to each, but not to the public house – for which it is doubtless grateful.


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Nicolas Loris
Loris and Tubb: The Donald does right thing by dumping Paris pact
June 5, 2017 at 12:00 a.m.
President Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement has unleashed a predictable firestorm of criticism. But it was the right move.The Paris agreement, which committed the...
Loris: Prez should keep vow, dump Paris climate pact
May 22, 2017 at 12:00 a.m.
After campaigning on a promise to "cancel" the Paris climate-change agreement, President Trump announced he would make a decision in the coming weeks.Senior officials within the administration remain divided on...
Loris: Undoing useless climate rules will boost economy
April 4, 2017 at 12:00 a.m.
President Donald Trump's executive order to undo several Obama-era global-warming regulations has some critics steaming.Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, accused Trump of "taking a sledgehammer...
Loris: Climate policies a drag on economy
December 8, 2015 at 12:00 a.m.
President Obama's opening remarks at the Paris climate summit were effectively an apology for industrial progress. He said, "I've come here personally, as the leader of the world's largest economy...
Loris: Prez's climate regs hurt the poor
Throughout the pope's visit, the Obama administration has been adamant in pushing the message that climate change will hit the poor the hardest. They're omitting one small but critical word,...
Stupidity spotlighted
November 20, 2010 at 12:00 a.m.
In 2007, Congress passed an energy bill that placed stringent efficiency requirements on incandescent bulbs in an attempt to phase them out beginning in 2012 and replace them with more...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The LD Micro Index was down today 6.17 points, closing at 2,431.10; down 0.25%.
Utilities, Real Estate, Consumer Cyclical, Energy, Communication Services and Healthcare sectors were in the red today led by Utilities, which was down 0.74%. Industrials, Financials Services, Basic Materials, Technology and Consumer Defensive sectors were in the green today led by Industrials, which was up 0.66%.


Is your lookup looking a little plain? Want to feel bigger, better and more accomplished than others, but simply lack our benevolent ruler Dr. Sloth's unparalleled charisma? Even a customized lookup not giving you the confidence boost you need? Well, the easiest way to remedy that is to garnish your account with row upon row of fabulous trophies! While many trophies available in Neopia require a great amount of skill (or luck), some simply... don't. Below is a list of the different types of trophies you can earn.
There are two types of game trophies you can earn. The first requires no competition with other players. Although not always easy, you can earn these with patience, skill, and a little luck. These trophies are awarded when you complete certain levels of a game rather than beating other players' high scores. These games often don't require Flash or Shockwave, and don't require a state-of-the-art computer. Some examples include Neoquest I and II, Cheat!, Snow Wars, Pyramids, and Cellblock.
One trophy deserving special mention comes from defeating Punchbag Bob in the Battledome. He's an easy opponent in that he doesn't attack your pet at all, but challenging in that he has an extremely high number of hit points. If you don't have formidable weapons and a high Strength boost, beating him could take you a long time. As long as you're patient and keep whittling away, you'll eventually defeat him and come away with a shiny green trophy!
Besides Flash games, there is also another way to compete with players on the site to win trophies. These come in the form of monthly tournaments where you'll have to face off against of a variety of different players. This will require quite a bit of dedication over the course of a month (or more, if you don't win the first time). There are only three games that participate in these kinds of monthly tournaments: Armada, Geos, and Kacheekers.
There are a number of different contests on Neopets that require either artistic talent, smarts, or good perception. They each have their own trophy and you can get multiples of each trophy. (This would show up as a x2, x3, etc on your profile.) A few of these contests include the Neopian Times, Art Gallery, Poetry Contest, Storytelling Contest, and the Lenny Conundrum.
These trophies can only be obtained through Neopets' plots. These are special occasions that usually happen once or twice a year that can involve solving a series of puzzles and defeating enemies in the Battledome.
Most plot trophies are only available to players who participated in the plot at the time it took place. There have been many plots in the past - keep an eye on New Features to see if one's coming up! There is one exception to the retired plot trophy rule: the Altador mini-plot. It is open indefinitely and will still earn you a trophy and prizes. Our Altador Plot guide details all the steps you need to take to complete the plot.
A few other trophies are obtainable through Neopets' site events. These commonly take place annually (as distinct from plots, which only happen once) and the trophy designs are often similar from year to year. You can earn a different trophy for each site event each year, and your stats from that event can pop-up when you click on the trophy in your profile. Notable site events include the Altador Cup, the Games Master Challenge and the Daily Dare.
These miscellaneous trophies appear in a special row on your lookup.
The Kadoatery trophy requires you to feed mewling Kadoaties in the Kadoatery, their special kennel located in the Neopia Central Plaza. To do this, you must compete with other players in real time, as only the first person to furnish a Kadoatie with their desired snack is credited with feeding them. Your lookup will boast a bronze Kodoatie trophy after successfully feeding one Kadoatie, a silver Kadoatie after feeding ten, and a golden Kadoatie after feeding twenty-five. Although this is the highest trophy, the caption beneath the trophy publicly lists how many Kadoaties you have fed to date, resulting in an unofficial trophy upgrade of sorts. Many Kad feeders strive to feed 75 Kadoaties, sometimes referred to as "going pink" because of the pink avatar that this achievement earns, and some players, known as "overfeeders," continue Kad feeding beyond that. To learn the art of Kad feeding, see our Kadoatery guide.
The Site Feature Trophies include two slots for trophies available from the Battledome-based Defenders of Neopia game, one for each of the two current series. In each series, you are tasked with battling various opponents in a set order. Defeating an opponent may require tailored battle strategies, improved battle stats, or advanced weapon sets. After each successful mission, you are awarded a new Site Feature Trophy commemorating your victory, which replaces the previous mission's trophy. There are seventeen possible trophies from Series 1 and five from Series 2. As of this update, the Battledome is still in Beta mode and the game is not currently awarding trophies. For a list of opponents, strategies, and trophies, see our iDP guide to DoN.
Premium users receive the Lucky Space Faerie Charm, formerly obtained after referring two or more people to Neopets Premium, but now a standard Premium benefit. This valuable feature randomly doubles the Neopoints you receive from playing Flash games.
All players also automatically have the Lutari Talisman on their profile. You can place different coloured beads with a variety of properties on your talisman.
A final area on your user lookup includes trophy-like icons based on your NC purchases. These include the NC Mall Album, which shows all the purchases you've made in the NC Mall and can be enabled or disabled from the Album Management page; the NC Collectible Collector's Album, and your "NC Wish List", which was added to lookups but never actually released as a feature.


1. Having some time since determined on having a carriage road constructed from Emu Plains, on the left bank of the river Nepean, across the Blue Mountains, to that fine tract of open country to the westward of them, discovered lately by Mr. Evans, and having recently received from you a voluntary offer of your superintending and directing the working party to be employed on this very important service, I now most readily avail myself of your very liberal and handsome offer of superintending and directing the construction of this road; and do invest you with full power and authority to carry out this important design into complete effect, Government furnishing you with the necessary means to enable you to do so.
2. The number of artificers and labourers--namely, thirty--and the guard of eight soldiers you have yourself already selected, or required, shall be allowed and furnished to you forthwith for this service, and they shall be supplied with a plentiful and adequate ration of provisions whilst employed upon it.
3. Herewith you will receive a list of the number of artificers and labourers allowed for this purpose, together with a scale on the back thereof of the weekly ration of provisions they are to receive. You will also receive herewith for your guidance copies of my letters addressed to the Deputy Commissary-General on the subject of the provisions, stores, tools, utensils, arms, ammunition, slops, and other necessaries to be furnished from his depÙt for this service, all of which will be forwarded to you to the depÙt established on Emu Plains forthwith, and which you will be pleased to receive and take charge of on their arrival there, placing such a guard over them as you may deem expedient, the sergeant commanding the guard of soldiers being instructed to receive all his orders from you for the guidance of himself and party, and for their distribution.
You will likewise receive herewith for your information a general list, or schedule, of the provisions, stores, slops, tools, implements, and other necessaries intended to be forwardal to you from Sydney by the two separate conveyances or convoys, illeluding one horse, two new carts (with harness), and two yokes of well-broken-in bullocks, it being my intention to send off the first convoy from Sydney to-morrow morning for Emu Plains, and the second convoy in a fortnight afterwards.
Firstly: The road is to commence at the ford (already determined on) on the river Nepean, Emu Plains, and from thence across the Blue Mountains to the Macquarie River, and a centrical part of Bathurst Plains, following the track laid down by Mr. Evans' map, of which I have already furnished you with a copy. But in case you should, upon further examination of the track he followed, find it advisable to inake any occasional deviations therefrom, you have my full permission to do so.
Secondly: The road thus made must be at least 12 ft. wide, so as to permit two carts or other wheel earriages to pass each other with ease. The timber in forest ground to be cut down and cleared away 20 ft. wide, grubbing up the stumps and filling up the holes, so that a four-wheel carriage or cart may pass without difficulty or danger.
Thirdly: In brush ground it is to be cut 20 ft. wide and grubbed up 12 ft. wide. Any small bridges that may be found requisite to be made must be 12 ft. wide. I conceive this to be a sufficient width for the proposed road at present; but where it can with ease and convenience be done, I should prefer the road to be made 16 ft. wide.
Fourthly: You will use your own discreation in ectablishing one or two more depots for provisions, according as you may find them necessary, after you have once crossed the Blue Mountains and descended into the plain country, taking care to establish such depÙts, however, in such places as affords plenty of good, wholesome water for man and beast.
Whatever extra expense you may incur in constructing these depots will be paid from the Colonial Police Fund, and also the amount of such slops, stores, or other articles as you may find it necessary to supply the working party with for their use and comfort during the time they are employed on this service.
5. I have now only to add that I shall at all times be happy to hear from you during the progress of the service you have thus been so good as to offer to see executed; and I shall most readily comply with any demands for provisions, stores, or tools you may have occasion to make during the continuance of it: having an entire confidence in your discretion and prudence, and being convinced that you will not make any demands that are not essentially requisite for promoting the present undertaking.
6. As it might prove of very great inconvenience, expense, and trouble to you personally, and greatly interrupt and disturb the working party, if the people, from motives of curiosity, were permitted to visit you or your party during the time you and they are employed on the present service, I have deemed it advisable to issue a Government and general order prohibiting such idlers from visiting you, or crossing the Nepean at Emu Plains, without a pass signed by me. I enclose you herewith some few printed copies of this order, which I request you will have posted up at proper censpicuous places, and give the necessary order to your guard and to your constable to see it strictly enforced.


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Contact Anita
Anita Briem
Birthday #11
Destiny #11
Anita Briem - an Actress - born on Saturday May 29th 1982, in Iceland,.
Anita Briem is the philanthropist and humanitarian who is deeply concerned about the state of the world, for which she has great compassion and idealism. She has a utopian personality, and will spend her life trying to realize some aspect of her utopian dream, sacrificing money, time, and energy for a better world.
Her broad outlook on life allows Briem to see the big picture, and to often shy away from dealing with the minute details. That is why Anita Briem attracts people who can fit into her larger plans and take over the areas she considers uninteresting. Consequently, Anita evaluates people on the basis of what they can do for the larger cause. She is a true egalitarian, rarely prejudiced and would not accept social biases of people.
Interior decorating, landscape art or photography can be the sort of fields in which Anita's imagination and creativity can harmoniously arrange the beauty already potential in the environment. However, due to her strong social consciousness - she can be an effective politician, lawyer, judge, minister, teacher, healer, environmentalist or in any other vocation that carries a clear social impact.
Anita Briem has a romantic personality, but her love is more impersonal as she tends to be focused on her dreams instead. When not in harmony with her true nature, Anita can fall to moodiness, or become aloof, and withdrawn. She can also become timid, uncertain, and ungrateful, putting the blame for her troubles on others or the world. She is often disappointed by the realities of life, her own shortcomings, and those of others, and is relentlessly driven to improve upon it all - striving for greater accomplishments. This is Anita's life-lesson - to accept the natural limitations of the world and its habitants in order to make it possible for her to enjoy life more fully.
Briem must learn to let go of material possessions and relationships because holding on too tightly to anything causes her pain. The more she gives, the bigger is her reward, and the most successful and satisfying road for her is sharing and sacrificing for the larger goal, without expecting anything in return. Anita Briem's greatest chance at success is to tie her personal fortunes to an endeavor that makes the world a better place for others. It may very well turn into a highly successful and lucrative enterprise, providing amply for Anita and her family. More...
More flavors to Anita's personality
Entrepreneurial and progressive, Anita Briem is ever-striving, heading for the top, and enjoying an enterprising, ambitious and determined personality to do things well, and an unyielding dedication to her plan until the goals are achieved.
There is danger, however that her trait of determination and dedication will shift to stubbornness, making Anita cling to ideas and projects well past their fruitious season. It is a good idea for her to keep fresh pipeline of ideas to make it easier to replace outdated plans by new and better ones.
Patient as she is towards her goals, Anita's flying, ravaging temper endangers her relationships with the very same people that will help her to accomplish those goals. She should use her strength of will to study and practice anger management.
Anita Briem makes a good performer, but at the same time she can be quite intense and serious.
Her artistic talent is emphasized in the performing arts where sensitivity and understanding for people and situations is called for.
Anita can easily gain high respect in the community, being understanding of the views of others, and she often tends to achieve her goals.
When balanced, she is compassionate and emotionally secure. Briem is also a natural healer, with leadership qualities and the ability to genuinely empathize. She also radiates love and spiritual happiness to those around her.
When unbalanced, drama queen is not an unfamiliar term to Anita, and she often likes to give advice to others even when her own life is a mess.
By becoming aware of her emotions, she can gain control over them rather than have her emotions control her life. And the reward is great because then she shows vast depth of understanding while keeping her emotions checked.
Tour Anita's menu and gain more insight into her personality traits, relationships, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, compatibility with you and with others, and much more.
July 15th 2019 brings Anita Briem feelings of freedom.
With an enhanced sense of humor and laughter, Anita masters social events she attends and romantic encounters.
The day invites Briem to expand her interests and meet new people.
This uphorian day might cause Anita Briem to act in self-indulgence, which she must avoid. Lack of concentration and application, and carelessness could be also experienced.
You and Anita
Other female celebrities born on the same day as Anita Briem
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An American model, bodybuilder, former college basketball player and professional wrestler of Samoan and German ancestry, currently performs on the WWE's Raw brand, and is a pre-order playable character on WWE 2K17 video game
Maribel Guardia (1959)
A Costa Rican actress, model, singer and TV hostess, who currently lives and works in Mexico, and is Miss Costa Rica 1978 and Miss Universe-Miss Photogenic 1978
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An American actress and model who is the daughter of singer-songwriter Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough, and the eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley
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An American actress, reality television star, television producer, and LGBT advocate, best known as Sophia Burset on the TV series Orange Is the New Black, for which she became the first openly transgender nominated for an Primetime Emmy Award in the acting category
Annette Bening (1958)
An American actress who is a four-time Academy Award-nominee for films such as The Grifters (1990), American Beauty (1999), Being Julia (2004) and The Kids Are All Right (2010) wnd a Golden Globe receipiant for The Kids Are All Right
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Anita Briem personality profile | © Copyright 2009-2019 Celebrities Galore and Master Numerologist Hans Decoz


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You are at:Home»News»Agriculture»Manitou's Reduce TCO doubles hydraulic oil service life
Manitou's Reduce TCO doubles hydraulic oil service life
By Tom Stone on	 22nd July 2016 Agriculture, Construction, Fluid Power, Materials Handling, Vehicle Development
The Manitou Group is pursuing its commitments to reducing its environmental footprint. Its Manitou Reduce fuel eco-program has already increased transparency with regard to the fuel consumption of its handling machines and helps support customers in reducing their own consumption.
Now Reduce TCO helps customers choose their equipment after taking into account all of the costs of ownership of the machine. In order to reduce these costs, the Manitou Group is putting numerous actions in place, including prolonged engine oil change intervals for hydraulic systems which not only helps reduce maintenance costs for the customer but also reduces the ecological impact by reducing emissions from polluting products.
According to the breakdown of the costs of ownership of a machine, 30% is charged to fuel. The Reduce fuel eco-program helps to reduce this consumption.
Furthermore, 20% of the costs of operating a machine are linked to maintenance and repairs. To act on this analysis and its environmental objectives, the Manitou Group is optimizing the frequency of oil-change maintenance for hydraulic systems so as to meet the expectations of its customers.
Initiated in 2014, the approach called for new test protocols to be set out and performed on 16 telescopic trucks with different types of oils for different applications in several countries followed by extensive analyses of the results. After two years of studies, the results of the test have shown that the oil change intervals for hydraulic systems, initially set at 1,000 hours, can be extended to 2,000 hours with no impacts on the condition and operation of machines.
This measure allows customers to save 50% on the costs of hydraulic oil and avoids, for example, 600 liters of oil being discarded for an MLT 735 (Telescopique Agri 7m/3.5t) over 10 years of operation.
"Our measure concerns MLT telescopic (Manitou Loader Telescopic) and MT (Manitou Telescopic) Stage IIIB trucks with the priority on five ranges of 'best-sellers', i.e. approximately 20 models impacted," said Olivier Le Pesquer, head of the services range for the Manitou Group.
"A large number of other TCO projects are also under way, with the aim of providing responsible and profitable solutions for our customers."
The Manitou Group is leading the way in data transparency while guaranteeing the performance and quality of its machines. This latest measure confirms the group's commitment to protecting the environment. As proof, the OEM is continuing its work on solutions to optimize TCO such as reducing fluid consumption.
In other Manitou news, Arnaud Boyer has been appointed VP of marketing and product development within the sales and marketing division. He will report to François-Frédéric Piffard, EVP of the sales & marketing division.
With an engineering degree from the Centrale Marseille graduate school in France, in addition to an MBA from HEC business school in Paris, Boyer has held a variety of positions of responsibility in sales and marketing in the automotive sector, including nine years at Renault UK. He then spent almost three years working as sales director for Epyx France, a company offering electronic invoicing solutions between leasers and distributors.
Arnaud subsequently held various marketing management positions at Case New Holland (CNH), where he was named director of marketing services and communication at CNH Industrial Parts & Services EMEA in Roissy in 2015. His most recent experience at CNH notably provided an opportunity to develop his expertise in two of the three divisions in the Manitou Group: agriculture and construction.
"My goal is to ensure the success of the projects already initiated by the Manitou Group while placing customer satisfaction at the heart of our upcoming actions. It is essential to strengthen ties with our customers by developing services and products that are tailored even more closely to their needs," Boyer said.
Maxam produces most durable solution yet


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Suso extends contract to stay with AC Milan until 2022
AC Milan, Clubs, Italian Serie A, Story, Suso
Suso has committed his future to AC Milan.
AC Milan forward Suso has extended his contract at the Serie A club until June 30, 2022.
Milan announced the deal in a statement on Monday, ans Suso said "this will always remain one of the most important days of my life."
"I've extended my bond with Milan until 2022, and to do it with my family, my partner and my agent and my partner by my side filled me with emotion," he said.
"A particular, special thank you to the Milan directors. I'll do everything for this shirt, as I've always done. Forza Milan, always."
#ACMilan comunica di aver prolungato al 30 giugno 2022 il contratto economico di @suso30oficial pic.twitter.com/4ONG4HEJgQ
Suso joined Milan from Liverpool in January 2015 but was loaned out to Genoa a year later.
He returned to Milan for the start of the 2016-17 season and played a pivotal role under coach Vincenzo Montella, earning a call up to the Spain squad.
Suso weighed in with seven goals and nine assists in the league last season and he also set up Milan's equaliser in the Italian Super Cup victory against Juventus before converting his penalty in the shootout.
The 23-year-old Suso started this season where he left off the last campaign, with two goals and as many assists in the opening two league matches.