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Food|Butter Tarts, Canadaâs Humble Favorite, Have Much to Love

You could be forgiven if youâve never eaten a butter tart. There is no flashy frosting or elaborate lattice to entice you. Itâs easy to pass by.

âGood butter tarts, they seem like a modest dessert,â said Michael DeForge, a creator of TartQuest, an Instagram feed of butter tart reviews. âTheyâre supposed to pack a lot of punch. But on the outside, theyâre supposed to just seem plain and unassuming.â

âIf you look at the ingredients, itâs really what you have in your pantry when you have nothing else,â said Liz Driver, the author of âCulinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825â1949.â

At its most basic, the butter tart is a pastry filled with brown sugar, butter and egg. Oven alchemy transforms those simple ingredients into something spectacular. Inventive cooks have gone further with chocolate chips, coconut, nuts and other add-ins.

Unlike the Nanaimo bar â a midcentury British Columbian creation made with processed ingredients like custard powder and graham crackers â the butter tart goes back at least to the 19th century. The Canada Issue

Jan. 16, 2018

Mary F. Williamson, a retired fine arts librarian at York University in Toronto, traced the earliest mention to 1900 and the âRoyal Victoria Cook Book,â published to raise money for the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ontario. Margaret MacLeodâs recipe for âFilling for Tartsâ (like some of the other community cookbook contributors, she was identified by her husbandâs name, Mrs. Malcolm MacLeod) called for one cup of sugar, a half-cup butter, two eggs and a cup of currants.

There are as many theories about the origins of the tart as there are variations. The brown sugar pie, the Scottish border tart, Bakewell tarts and the Quebec sugar pie â each has been named a predecessor to the Canadian tart.

âEach of those things is their very own particular thing, very similar to each other, but theyâre not all the same,â Ms. Driver said.

The very first butter tart recipe may never be found, because until recently cookbooks were not seen as items worth preserving.

âMost of these things were developed by housewives, and it wasnât deemed important,â said Lenore Newman, the author of âSpeaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey.â âNow that weâre actually interested in it, we go back, and we find there are a lot of holes in this knowledge. I think we can safely say theyâre Canadian and that theyâre definitely still popular.â

By the 1910s, the butter tart was all the rage in the farming regions of Ontario. Three recipes for tart filling and six recipes for butter tarts appear in the âCanadian Farm Cook Bookâ of 1911. âJunia,â a columnist for The Farmerâs Advocate, shared reader recipes in early 1913 to answer a question from N.W. of Ontario who longed for a butter tart recipe â âthe crust and all, as I am a new beginner.â Readers responded with tart recipes plain and with currants, proof perhaps that the filling debate over plain or dried fruit is more than a century old.

That same year, the Lake of the Woods Milling Company published âFive Roses Cook Book,â with recipes from its customers; it spread the butter tart across the Dominion. At one point, there was one âFive Rosesâ cookbook for every four Canadian households, said Ms. Driver, the bibliographer.

By midcentury, Eatonâs department store in Toronto included a butter tart in its boxed picnic lunches, and Canadian Betty Crockers like Edith Adams (the fictional home economist of The Vancouver Sun) and Rita Martin (also fictional, with a name pronounceable in French and English) evangelized the tart, along with real-life home economists like Kate Aitken.

Loyalties to local favorites are fierce. In the 70 years since Don Lloyd opened his seasonal bakery in Bala, Ontario, the location has moved once, and ownership has flipped five times, but the butter tart recipe has never changed.

âPeople that used to come to Donâs in the â50s remember that same taste, so thatâs something weâre not messing around with,â said Jana Foster, who bought the bakery in Muskoka with her husband, Bryan, in 2010.

At Donâs, bakers crank out tarts, molding pastry dough into individual tins with an ancient hand-operated tart press that was brought over from Birmingham, England. Butter tarts â in plain, raisin or cranberry â are among the most popular items sold by the bakery during the May-to-October season. Last year, it sold 42,000 tarts alone. In September, the Fosters opened an outpost (with a modern tart press) in Barrie to keep up with year-round demand.

âI worked in a summer lodge where there were a lot of American visitors, and we could wow them every time with butter tarts with vanilla ice cream,â Ms. Baird said. âI think that was the first time I realized they were unique to Canada.â

Why, then, have the tarts never made significant waves south of the border? It could be that Canadians donât want to let the world â or just their louder neighbors â in on their sweetest secret.

âYou have so many things of your own,â Ms. Driver said with a laugh. âYou donât need a Canadian butter tart.â

Recipes: Butter Tarts | Butter Tart Squares

Does your family have a favorite butter tart recipe or variation? Share it with us for an upcoming story. Email email@example.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Small in Size, but Big on Flavor. Order Reprints | Todayâs Paper | Subscribe


Butter Tarts



Butter Tart Squares


