Butter Tart

The rim of thin pastry cracks lightly, and inside is a sweet, soft filling combining butter, sugar, and eggs. The Canadian butter tart is a sweet made by pouring a filling of butter, sugar, and eggs into a palm-sized pastry shell and baking it. Some include raisins or nuts, and some do not. Preferences also differ over whether the center should be soft enough to run or baked firm enough to hold its shape, and each household and region passes down its own way of making them.

Rounds of pastry shaped into small cups

The base is a pastry dough made by scattering cold butter or another fat through flour and bringing it together with cold liquid or egg. The gathered dough is chilled, rolled out thin, cut into rounds, and pressed into the hollows of a muffin tin or similar pan so that it follows their shape.

Because a single round has to fit into a deep hollow, folds and pleats form at the edge. Another method is to make short cuts from the edge and overlap the pieces to form a cup. When the bottom and sides are kept thin and the filling is added, the baked pastry encloses the filling and cracks lightly when bitten.

How firmly to set the sugar and egg filling

The filling is made by combining eggs with sugar, butter, and other ingredients. Some use brown sugar and corn syrup, and some also use maple syrup; the aroma and stickiness change with the sugars used. A small amount of salt or vinegar adds saltiness or acidity to the rich sweetness. Maple syrup is not an essential ingredient.

Raisins may be plumped in hot water and drained, and walnuts or pecans are chopped and added. Without add-ins, the smoothness of the sugar and eggs stands out; with fruit or nuts, there is added chew. The basic form is a soft filling made mainly of sugar and eggs, enclosed in a small pastry shell and baked.

The filling is poured in leaving room for it to bubble during baking. As it bakes, the edges turn golden and the eggs bind the filling, but the center stays soft. Letting the tarts rest in the pan after baking is also important; they are removed once the hot sugar syrup and the fragile pastry have settled. Cooling time varies by recipe (the ingredient proportions and method), and some methods remove the tarts only after they have cooled completely.

A 1900 recipe using currants

A cookbook published in 1900 by the women’s auxiliary of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ontario, includes Mrs. MacLeod’s “Filling for Tarts.” This short recipe, on page 88 of the copy held by the Simcoe County Archives, mixes 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of butter, 2 eggs, and 1 cup of currants and fills the shells with the mixture. There is no syrup, maple, or pecan; this early printed example used dried fruit.

“Royal Victoria Cook Book” (1900), pp. 88–89. Held by the Simcoe County Archives. The left page, “Filling for Tarts,” carries a short recipe that mixes sugar, butter, eggs, and currants and puts the mixture into tart shells.

The contributor was Mary Ethel MacLeod. Following the custom of the time, the cookbook listed her under her husband’s name as “Mrs. Malcolm MacLeod.” Whether she devised the recipe is uncertain, but the local cookbook supporting the hospital preserves the name of the person who contributed a method for dried-fruit tarts, along with her proportions.

In a 1908 Toronto cookbook of readers’ submissions, a recipe appears under the name “butter tarts” that adds vanilla and salt to sugar, butter, eggs, and currants. A 1911 cookbook for farm households gathered six recipes. Even as the name was becoming established, households had several different versions.

Similarities to and differences from sugar pie and pecan pie

The butter tart, Quebec’s tarte au sucre, and the American pecan pie have in common that a sweet filling is baked in a pastry shell. In a comparison of today’s representative recipes, the butter tart has eggs, sugar, and butter poured into a palm-sized, single-serving shell and can be made plain or with raisins. Some Quebec sugar pies use brown sugar, maple syrup, and cream. Pecan pie is typically one large pie filled generously with pecans.

Some butter tarts add pecans or maple, and some sugar pies use eggs. When these are compared, differences appear not only in any single ingredient but also in the size of the shell, which sugar provides the sweetness, and the amount of nuts and how they are placed. The order of invention and any direct lineage have not been established.

Touring shops and talking about preferences

Rather than being standardized to a single recipe, the butter tart has been passed down as a sweet whose fillings and softness people discuss with one another. At the butter tart festival in Midland, Ontario, visitors tour local shops, and beyond that, home bakers and professional bakers compete in separate categories for traditional recipes and for recipes using any ingredients. The judging compares appearance, such as the color of the bake and the thickness of the crust, the balance between filling and shell, and taste, and visitors can also taste the tarts after judging. In 2019, the butter tart was also chosen for Canada Post’s “Sweet Canada” stamps, which feature sweets from across the country. The small tart that appeared in household cookbooks is now loved both as a reason to tour shops and as a sweet that introduces Canada.

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