If How to Win Friends and Influence People had been written by a Canadian, it would have included a recipe for butter tarts. I won’t reveal just how many people I’ve influenced with butter tarts, but I’m fairly certain I’ve won over many friends—and my husband—because I’ve captured their hearts with this beloved Canadian dessert. With a gooey, just-set filling made with butter, brown sugar, maple syrup, and eggs, butter tarts are hard not to love. They have comforting notes of caramel and butterscotch and are perfect when you want something small and sweet. With minimal effort you can transform a few basic pantry staples into a truly special and crowd-pleasing dessert.
Just like Nanaimo bars, butter tarts are a national treasure of the Great White North. Although these bite-size tarts are popular all over Canada, they’re particularly beloved in Ontario. Each summer the town of Midland hosts the Butter Tart Festival, where professional and home bakers alike gather to share their spins on the classic Canadian dessert. In addition to this annual celebration, there are two dedicated butter tart routes—the Wellington County Butter Tart Trail and the Kawarthas Northumberland Butter Tart Tour—where you can take yourself on a self-guided adventure in search of some of the province’s best.
What makes a great butter tart is a matter of heated national debate, and many Canadians have very strong opinions about whether raisins or nuts should be included in the filling. Dawn Woodward, the baker and pastry chef behind the Toronto bakery Evelyn’s Crackers whose butter tarts were recently crowned as one of the city’s must-have desserts in the Toronto Star, was emphatic on this point: “No raisins ever!” She keeps it simple, without add-ins—a butter tart with nuts, she told me, is essentially a pecan pie—and makes her tarts with maple syrup and local wheat flour from Ontario, as well as organic butter from Quebec.
Woodward, an American transplant in Canada, did not enjoy her first butter tart. It was made with corn syrup, a common ingredient in mass-produced butter tarts sold across the country. She found them “super sweet and one-note,” and was inspired to come up with a version that was more complex in flavor. “There’s no way this tart started out with corn syrup,” Woodward muses. ”It’s funny, because some people look at [my tarts] and think ‘that’s not a butter tart…’ I say, ‘It’s better, and you should try it because it uses real maple syrup, which is more Canadian than corn syrup.’” The ideal butter tart, in Woodward’s opinion, should be baked until just set so the filling is still , but not runny.
This Canadian dessert is such a beloved sweet that cookbook recipes for it have remained nearly unchanged for almost a century. The Purity Cookbook, published in 1945 by the Canadian company Purity Flour Mills, carries two recipes for butter tarts: one with brown sugar and raisins, and another with maple syrup, brown sugar, and nuts. Both call for a touch of vinegar in the filling to help cut the sweetness. These recipes aren’t far off from the butter tarts I make at home, which come from a recipe in Ken Haedrich’s Pie Academy. Like Woodward, I skip the nuts and raisins.
Made with a muffin tin, these tarts are easy to assemble and fill. You can bake as many or few of them as you’d like, and because they’re meant to be rustic, no one will fault you for a less-than-perfect pie crust. (I like to use the butter tart as a vehicle for repurposing leftover pie dough after the holidays, which saves me from having to make a new dough.) Once your pie crust is made, rolled, and gently pressed into the muffin tin, you can set it in the freezer to chill while you make the filling, which requires just a quick whisk before it’s ladled into the tarts. I invite you to add nuts or raisins if you wish, though I suspect there are several outraged Canadians reading this right now who’d probably like a word with me.
