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Butter Tarts
1 cup brown sugar 1 cup currants Butter size of a walnut Flavor to taste Beat all until full of bubbles. Drop from teaspoon into lined patty tin, and bake in quick oven. One cup dates may be added if desired.
A skeletal filling recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what a butter tart looked like. A few things need spelling out before it will work.
- The missing eggAs printed there is no egg, nor any liquid at all, yet the instruction to beat until full of bubbles and the expectation of a set filling both point to one. Butter tart fillings of this period generally do include egg; without one you will get boiled sugar that never firms.
- Butter size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons. Either way it is a small amount of butter for a cup of sugar.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Small tarts at that heat will likely need somewhere around 10-15 minutes; pull them when the filling is puffed and still trembling at the centre, since it sets as it cools.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes and draining well keeps them from scorching in a hot oven.
- Lined patty tinA shallow tart or patty tin lined with rounds of short pastry; the book assumes pastry made from another page. No yield is given, and since the filling is dropped from a teaspoon the tarts are small ones.
- Flavor to tasteMost likely a flavouring extract or spice: vanilla, nutmeg, or lemon rind. A teaspoon of vanilla or a good grating of nutmeg is in keeping.
- Filling depthTwo-thirds full at most. Butter tart filling boils up hard and welds the tarts to the tin if overfilled; let them cool five minutes, then lift while still warm.
Butter tarts are one of the few pastries generally accepted as Canadian in origin, and the earliest printed recipes are usually traced to Ontario community cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. They belong to a broad family of sugar-and-egg tarts — treacle tart, chess pie, sugar pie — that let a household turn cheap sweetener and a scrap of pastry into something festive. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by a flour milling company and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian kitchens, and its recipes are written accordingly: terse, assuming a cook who already knows the dish and needs only the proportions. The cup of dates is offered as an option, one of several fillings a cook might add or leave out.