![]() I was a young kid in Germany watching the classic film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. My first encounter with treacle tart was an ominous one. Treacle tart is a quintessential British teatime dessert.Īnd for you Harry Potter fans out there, treacle tart also happens to be Harry’s favorite dessert. Since that original recipe treacle tart has commonly included the added ingredients of cream and eggs to create a softer, more luxurious filling. The first mention of a treacle tart recipe dates back to a 19th century cookbook by English author Mary Jewry. Treacle tart is a sweet pastry consisting of a buttery shortcrust base and a gooey filling made from treacle (aka golden syrup), breadcrumbs and lemon zest. The adjective tart, ‘sharp-tasting’, incidentally, is a completely different word, which goes back to Old English teart, ‘acerbic’.A buttery, flaky pastry crust is filled with a sweet and gooey lemon-infused filling, this traditional Treacle Tart recipe features one of Great Britain’s most famous desserts at its best!Ī traditional British dessert, don’t be fooled by its simple list of ingredients and simple appearance – Treacle Tart is irresistibly delicious! What is Treacle Tart? The diminutive tartlet, also a borrowing from French, is of equal antiquity with tart: to quote the Forme of Cury again, it describes how to make ‘tartlettes’ with minced pork, eggs, currants, and saffron. The original inspiration was presumably that tarts were thought of as sweet and toothsome. Not until the 1880s do we find instances of its being applied to prostitutes. The expression is not generally employed by the young men, unless the female is in “her best”’). The word seems first to have been applied colloquially to women in the mid-nineteenth century, as a term of endearment rather than abuse (the first to record it was John Hotten, in his Dictionary of Modern Slang (1864): ‘ Tart, a term of approval applied by the London lower orders to a young woman for whom some affection is felt. In Britain, this usage survives in the particular context of jam tarts, but on the whole tart refers to a larger version of this, with a jam, fruit, or custard filling, that is cut into slices for serving, or to a similar fruit-filled pastry case with a crust-in other words, a fruit pie. In America, the word tart tends to indicate a small individual open pastry case with a sweet, usually fruit filling. In modern English, a decided Atlantic rift in usage has developed. Only gradually over the centuries did the meat disappear (and also to a large extent the vegetables, although one may still encounter the occasional spinach tart). What is certain, though, is that when English acquired the word in the fourteenth century, it denoted an open pastry case that could contain meat or fish as well as fruit or vegetables (the medieval cookery book Forme of Cury gives a recipe for tarts of flesh, which contain minced pork and rabbit). (German torte, ‘rich cake or tart’, as in Sachertorte and Linzertorte, probably comes from the same Latin source, as ultimately do Italian tortellini and American Spanish tortilla.) However, not all etymologists accept this derivation. This in turn came from Latin torta, ‘round bread’, which literally meant ‘twisted’ (it was a derivative of the verb torquēre, ‘twist’). Some have suggested that it is an alteration (influenced by medieval Latin tartarum, ‘Tatar’) of Old French torte, ancestor of modern French tourte, a round savoury or sweet pie or tart. English borrowed it in the fourteenth century from Old French tarte, but no one knows for certain where tarte came from. The origins of the word tart are a mystery.
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