Butter tart Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The butter tart is a small, sweet baked good: a pastry shell filled with egg, sugar, syrup and butter, then baked. It has long been loved as the pastry of central Canada, and of Ontario above all.

Its present form was born in the settler households of late-nineteenth-century Ontario. It is made from simple, easily obtained ingredients: eggs, wheat, syrup, sugar and pastry. Wheat, butter and sugar all became available locally as settlers arrived, and sugar came in through colonial trade. Cheap and easy to make, the tart spread as a home bake in frontier households and in time grew into a national sweet of Canada.

Old pastries nearly always come with a story of distinguished ancestors, and the butter tart has two.

The first holds that the "King's Daughters" (filles du roi), about 800 settler women sent from France to Quebec between 1663 and 1673, brought with them the sugar pie (tarte au sucre). This story runs aground on both the pastry's name and the way it is made. An entry for "butter tart" appears in Thomas Wright's Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (1857), which quotes a recipe from The Queen's Royal Cookery (1709). The name belongs to the English-speaking world rather than the French, and it is far older than the Canadian records. The fillings differ too: the sugar pie is made with cream and salt, the butter tart with egg and syrup. Quebec's sugar pie belongs to a separate line descending from French regional pastry, and there is no ground for placing it in the same lineage as the Ontario butter tart. An essay on the Ontario butter tart at Beer Et Seq goes so far as to say that the sugar pie "does not enter into the historical reckoning." It was an origin myth carried along by its own charm.

The second ancestor story is set in Ecclefechan, on the Scottish border, where a pastry with the same name and the same make really did exist as the border tart. Between 1815 and 1870 some 170,000 Scottish immigrants settled in Ontario, and in early Ontario this pastry too was called the "border tart." The name, the make and the path of migration all hint at an English and Scottish forerunner, though this has not been confirmed.

The firm footing lies in a later and plainer record. The oldest known published recipe is "Filling for Tarts," contributed by Mary Ethel MacLeod to page 88 of the cookbook of the Royal Victoria Hospital Women's Auxiliary, compiled in Barrie, Ontario, in 1900 (sugar, butter, egg and currants). The cookbook survives in the Simcoe County Archives. The tart also appears in a pie cookbook of 1915, by which time it had taken root in English-speaking central Canada.

The glamorous tale tracing its line back to distant France found footing in neither the name nor the make. What remains is this: the butter tart was born as a simple household pastry in late-nineteenth-century Ontario. A link to the border tart of England and Scotland is likely, but it has not been confirmed.