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Butter Tarts
Butter 1/2 size of egg Flavoring 1 C sugar 1 C currants Make a rich pie crust and line patty tins, pour in mixture and bake at once.
Mrs. Robert H. Grummitt. 98
A church-supper shorthand recipe that assumes the cook already knows what a butter tart is. As printed the ingredient list is incomplete, so read it as a memory aid rather than a formula.
- The missing binderButter tart fillings of this period generally include one or two beaten eggs alongside the butter, sugar and dried fruit, often with some syrup or cream. Nothing here binds the sugar, and "1/2 size of egg" refers to the butter, not to an egg in the filling; the instruction to "pour in mixture" implies a liquid filling that the printed list cannot produce. Baked exactly as written you would get scorched sugar and dry currants.
- "Butter 1/2 size of egg"A common nineteenth-century measure meaning a lump of butter half the bulk of a hen's egg, roughly 2 tablespoons or 1 oz. That is a very small amount of fat against a full cup of sugar, another sign the list is abbreviated.
- FlavoringLeft unspecified, presumably because the contributor took it as a matter of choice. For this filling that would most often mean vanilla, lemon, or a grating of nutmeg, about a teaspoon of extract or less.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes and draining well keeps them from drawing moisture out of the filling.
- Patty tinsShallow tartlet or muffin tins. A cup of sugar and a cup of currants fills about a dozen 2 1/2-inch tarts.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Rich pastry with a wet sugar filling is normally baked hot; something around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry edges are set and coloured and the filling is just set at the centre, is a reasonable modern reading.
- "Bake at once"The instruction that matters. Sugar filling standing in raw pastry draws water, softens the base and leaks under the crust as it heats. Fill the shells and get them into a preheated oven immediately.
- Removing themLet the tarts cool five minutes in the tin, no longer. Sugar that sets hard against the metal will weld the shells in place.
The butter tart is one of the few pastries generally accepted as Canadian in origin, and the earliest printed versions are usually traced to Ontario community cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century. The tart itself is likely older in practice, and it is often compared to the Scottish Ecclefechan and border tarts, which likewise fill a pastry shell with butter, sugar, egg and dried fruit -- though the line of descent is a traditional association rather than a documented one. Its appearance in an American Presbyterian church collection is of a piece with the abbreviated entries such books are full of: the contributor set down the proportions and left the method unwritten.