GRUB!: Butter Tarts

It’s been two months since I left London, which seems simultaneously aeons and also the mere blink of an eye. I won’t bother trying to encapsulate the experience here, or try to express my thoughts on the pandemic, the lockdown and the state of the word in general in the form of interpretive sourdough sculpture or whatever because there is everything to say and yet also there is really nothing to say. So instead I’ll just report that weather is finally properly lovely and warm and things are green and there have been two orioles at the bird feeder recently. ORIOLES!

What have I accomplished in the two months I’ve been here? Well, I’ve drawn more that sixty tiny cartoon robots, and developed a card game revolving around them that is actually kind of playable.

Prize for anyone who can figure out the gist of the game from this random array of cards...

I also drew some other stuff and made a couple actual physical postcards to send to friends. And my cryptic crosswording skills may just be at an all-time high. And I’m one film away from finishing watching the entire Marvel movie franchise, in order. Oh, and the downward dog is… better.

Also I built a birdhouse. For the discerning wren, looking to get away from it all. No comment on whether this may be a model for my next plan, once the boat starts to feel just a bit too big and expensive. You know, what with the total collapse of the live performance industry and all.

Here are things I haven’t done in lockdown: wrap up the year-end business accounts, banish the email address from my last gig that keeps popping up annoying messages telling me it can’t log in, finish the “Boat Manual” I started ages ago, purge the photos on my computer so the hard drive isn’t bursting at the seams, clean up my online passwords, keep up with the Russian, or make banana bread.

I did, however, make something infinitely better than banana bread. I made buttertarts!

As I reported to Karen.

I’ve mentioned butter tarts before, but it bears repeating if only because I know I’ll struggle to get this post up to a normal word count. Butter tarts are individually sized sweet tarts made with short crust pastry and filled with a cooked mixture of butter, sugar, vanilla, egg and raisins. They occupy the same category as treacle tart, tarte au sucre, and shoofly pie, being a sugar/syrup-based filling in shortcrust pastry. Butter tarts are iconically Canadian and were recently celebrated by Canada Post in a set of truly excellent commemorative stamps that also included Saskatoon Berry Pie, Nanaimo bars, Tarts au Sucre and Blueberry Grunt.

What an outstanding collection. I’ve never had Blueberry Grunt but all the rest of those are absolute keepers.

Though I must protest at the characterisation of butter tarts as “Ontario-based”. I mean sure, they had to give the prairies the Saskatoon Pie, but really?

So I decided to make butter tarts. They’re actually pretty simple, even more so if you shortcut and use pre-made frozen tart shells, which are obviously not as nice as homemade pastry but clearly still inifintely better than no butter tarts at all. I wanted to make the pastry too because it’s nicer, and I’m not exactly short of time, and because the butter tarts of my childhood have lovely folds in the sides where the round disc of pastry wrinkles to fit into the muffin tin in which they’re baked. And I think the foldy sides are important. As, apparently, does Canada Post, because you can see the type specimen butter tart they used for their stamp is exceptionally foldy.

Thus the famed Robin Hood Prize Winning Recipes cookbook was unearthed.
(Published in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1947.)

The locally-favoured pastry recipe I used featured Crisco vegetable shortening instead of butter, which apparently produces a flakier crust. I’m not a pastry expert by any means, and not about to get into the great debate over the right fat to use in pastry. I just went with it. Oh, and the pastry recipe called for in the Robin Hood cookbook is a sweetened one and I think these are actually better with regular unsweetened pastry, since they are not exactly lacking in the sweetness department and the plain pastry sets that off well.

Though I must register my deep disappointment that the Beehive Syrup people have abandoned the iconic yellow beehive-shaped bottle of my childhood in favour of the insipid and utterly uninspired offering shown in the photo above. Shame on you! Shame!

Pleasingly, the pastry did make somewhat foldy sides when it went into the tray.

With the pastry shells chilling in the freezer it was on to the filling, which is very simple to make, and even easier if you soften the butter in the microwave instead of bothering with a stovetop melting scenario outlined below.

The Robin Hood butter tart recipe. Surprisingly little butter for a recipe that has butter right in the name. I don’t know why they’re called that so don’t bother asking. (Also note that the bit about using one egg or two lets you produce a more liquidy oozy filling with just one egg, or a more structural, set filling with two. I went for two and I have no regrets. The flavour is the same, and they’re just easier to eat.) (Also also note that UK-based Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers lacking the correct locally sourced Beehive Syrup could probably substitute golden syrup with acceptable results.)

Also also also note that you definitely want the full 2/3 cup of raisins in this. And don’t even think about coming in here with any of your raisin-hate because it’s my blog and this blog is a place of raisins. Raisins in pie. Raisins in brownies. Raisins in Chicken Salad. Raisins anywhere I damned well want. And especially, emphatically, raisins in butter tarts.

And when I googled around about raisin pie in general, and the prairies + raisin pie filling in particular I came across this post from Facebook that is so perfect I’m including it here. It’s from someone named Wanda (already awesome) to the E.D. Smith pie filling company:

"Hi, I’m wondering why we cannot get the raisin pie filling anymore? We used to buy in the big pails to make pies for our local curling rink kitchen and it’s no longer available in Saskatchewan, Canada. We can’t even get the tins.”

So so sooooooo prairie. She can’t get enormous vats of canned raisin pie filling to make pies for the local curling rink. Because, tragically, E.D. Smith no longer make raisin pie filling AT ALL. I feel your pain Wanda. Stay strong!

To summarise: Raisins rock. Raisin haters shut up. Moving on.

The filling mixture. Note I didn’t bother with the “beaten just sufficiently to combine” business. I just dropped the eggs in and whomped the bejesus out of it and it was all fine.

Spoon the whomped up filling into the unbaked tart shells, being careful to get the raisins relatively evenly distributed. Do not hesitate to add raisins where lacking.

These went into the hot oven on the bottom rack, as required by Robin Hood himself, normally not one to be trifled with. But here I have to report that Mr. Hood led me wrong and I would recommend the middle rack, because they were very cooked and started to brown excessively after less than ten minutes so I moved them up and cracked open the oven to cool it off some and kind of watched them and hovered, but you could probably avoid that drama by using the middle rack. (Edited to add that it turns out the oven was acting up and was probably 25 degrees too hot so perhaps all the drama was a particularly local phenomenon and maybe you should just pay attention to the King of Thieves after all.) Also note that the filling puffs up a lot when baking but settles right down once the tarts are out of the oven.

Butter tarts cooling on the porch. As you might note, the pastry was perhaps excessively flaky, which is an unusual thing to complain about in pastry. However in a handheld individual tart I feel like a bit more structural integrity might be helpful.

Flakiness aside, the butter tarts were a hit, and even better on the second day, and third. And lots of them had the requisite foldy sides. And it goes without saying that these are really really good with coffee.

Reviews were good too… "excellent raisin to filling ratio, good consistency. I like the sweetness level, good pastry, over all good bake.” Great British Bake Off, here I come.

And just to really stick it to any lingering raisin-haters still hanging about, as a special bonus I include the Robin Hood Prize Winning Recipes offering for Raisin Pie.

“Good pastry is an accomplishment that brings more happiness to the world than the ability to sing a high C or fell the Sheriff of Nottingham’s deputies with a single arrow loosed from a stout English longbow!” - Robin Hood.

Grid roads, prairie fables, and other tall tales

Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will know that Saskatchewan is undoubtedly the tourist hub of Canada. Forget Vancouver (too rainy), Toronto (too crowded), and Montreal (too historic). Right in the middle of everything, Saskatchewan offers an endless supply of delights for the average tourist, as evidenced by the rich offerings seen on a single 10k run down the grid roads of just one small corner of this diverse, varied and multifarious province.

Saskatchewan, like Alberta and Manitoba, was divided into square mile sections by the Dominion Land Survey, which began in 1871 and eventually became the world’s largest survey grid laid down in a singe integrated system. (Eat your heart out, Ordnance Survey!) This was to aid in settlement for agricultural purposes by making it simple to accurately describe the exact size and location of any piece of land. Each square mile section is known as a… section. Each block of 36 sections (a 6x6 square) make up a township, and each section is sub-divided into quarter sections of roughly 40 acres each. And to allow for equal access, a network of gravel roads was laid between sections, in a grid. Hence the term "grid road”. The whole system was especially important to the Dominion Land Act, which encouraged settlement and cultivation of the prairies by granting an immigrant the right to settle on a specific section of land for a $10 fee. If, after three years, at least a quarter of the section was cultivated and a permanent home was built (even if it was a simple sod hut) the settler was granted ownership of the land. Hence, we get the perfect checkerboard pattern of the prairies, and the perfect arrow-straightness of the roads.

No extraneous turns for us! Just vanishing points and sky. Historically, Saskatchewan’s grid roads were used for the testing and calibrating of plumb lines and, more recently, laser pointers. It’s also a well known that Saskatchewan is so flat, if you look carefully enough into the distance, you can see the back of your own head.

After an exciting left turn, the first point of interest I encountered on my run was this innocuous little grey box.

Often mistaken for power grid junctions or telephone exchanges these are actually what are known as Piffler Caches - emergency supply drops placed by the Royal Prairie Institute For Farm Labour Emergency Rescue.

The volunteer members of the Royal Prairie Institute For Farm Labour Emergency Rescue (R.P.I.F.F.L.E.R.) are often know by their nickname, the Pifflers. (The R was added by Royal grant in 1977 on the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, long after the 1933 founding of the organisation. I remember getting a special R.P.I.F.F.L.E.R. badge for my Brownie uniform that year.) Piffler Caches are aways placed a fixed distance apart, just off the road. The exact distance was originally calculated by testing how far an able-bodied farmhand could crawl through a snowdrift in temperatures below -30 degrees celsius (though of course the original calculation was done in Fahrenheit).

Piffler caches are supposed to be stocked with a seasonally-appropriate range of supplies and secured with a lock to minimise the chance of vandalism. The padlocks normally use a numerical combination and are currently keyed to the 6-digit day, month and year that the Saskatchewan Roughriders last won the Grey Cup, a date that only a true son or daughter of Saskatchewan could be expected to recall in a half-frozen or mosquito-addled state.

My run was a casual one, so I slowed down to check out this particular piffler. Sadly, the upkeep of piffler caches and the general health of small local R.P.I.F.F.L.E.R. branches has been on a steady decline for years so I was surprised to see this one very well-stocked. Late April is still very much a shoulder season so this one had winter, spring and summer supplies including mitts, a toque, a folding shovel, rubber boots, 90-factor sunscreen, Deep Woods Off, a thermos of black coffee, a re-used margarine container of home made butter tarts, a small flask of rye & coke, two coffee crisps and a bag of Old Dutch Ripple Chips. It was good to see that the local Piffler branch is still apparently alive and kicking. (UK readers can think of the R.P.I.F.F.L.E.R. as a kind of mashup between the RNLI and the Women’s Institute, but with fewer rowboats and Victoria sponges, and more dust and down-filled clothing.)

(And of course Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will recognise that R.P.I.F.F.L.E.R. and the pifflers in general are the origin of the word “piffling”. The monumental task of building, stocking and maintaining the thousands of piffler caches across the entire province is obviously referred to as piffling, a word whose definition has, over time, been ironically subverted to mean its exact opposite - something small and insignificant.)

However, it’s not all butter tarts and blue skies on the prairie. We are subject to Nature’s whims, as evidenced by this catastrophic flooding.

Graphic and terrifying spring floods.

Luckily, my run was a loop circumnavigating two complete sections in a perfect 6-mile rectangle, so I only had to brave this perilous crossing once. The piffler cache did not include a canoe or even a set of water wings but I still made it across safely and on to the next landmark of my run.

Homestead of the legendary Big John - prairie tourist Mecca. Check out the reviews on Tripadvisor! (Note: the interpretive centre and gift shop are currently closed due to the coronavirus lockdown. Normally the place is heaving with visitors. It’s quite unusual to get a photo of Big John Rock without a crowd of selfie-seekers in the way.)

Big John is a well-known prairie icon whose existence may have inspired the lesser-known legend of Paul Bunyan. Big John is said to have been able to clear, plough and seed a full section of land on a single day (before lunch), and is usually depicted accompanied by Barb, the giant blue gopher. His normal breakfast was one hundred pieces of toast, half with Cheez Whiz and half with Saskatoon berry jam, accompanied by ten gallons of black coffee that had been left on the back burner of the stove for at least six hours. John could stride across the prairies at an incredible pace, covering the distance between Davidson and Girvin in just seven steps and Barb’s burrowing created tunnels wide enough for two freight trains to pass side by side.

When he ran out of Cheez Whiz, Big John would have these giant shredded wheats for breakfast, in a bowl made out of a grain silo full of gopher milk.

Not long after I passed Big John Rock, I took the opportunity to snap this shot of:

The Great Wall of Drews. Of course I won’t pretend that this edifice is anything like as impressive as its “visible from space” eastern cousin. But it is visible from… the road. And makes up for its modest proportions with very satisfying straightness.

After a second exciting 90-degree left turn, I soon found I’d unknowingly reached the literal high point of the run, the peak of Mount Valley View.

This precipitous slope is popular with the large local downhill skiing community and is also used for summer altitude training by more serious athletes. (I didn't manage to get chair lift and chalet in frame… sorry).

Not long after there was another thrilling left turn, where I ran across this local signpost.

"Watch out for board gamers left and right”

Local residents spend a lot of time over the winter cooped up inside with their Scrabble and Monopoly and checkers (draughts for UK-based AGSWPLRs). Consequently, they tend to get a bit loopy when the spring finally arrives (usually by mid-August) and spread out indiscriminately with their tokens and dice and game boards. This sign is meant to alert passing motorists to the possible/likely presence of board gamers almost anywhere, though most pressingly, in the middle of the road. I won’t quote the sad statistics here, but the Yahtzee figures alone are tragic and the spike in serious incidents that followed the Trivial Pursuit craze in the 80’s still throws off the province’s actuarial tables.

After that sobering reminder of the harshness of prairie life I encountered one more interesting tidbit, this odd device sticking up in the lefthand ditch.

Pop-up monitor

Area 51 in Nevada may be the best known spot for run-of-the-mill alien-seekers, but those who are really in the know come north instead. Nevada may feature in the media hype and the pop-culture, but Saskatchewan, with its vast open areas (convenient for landing large or multi-dimensional craft), sparse population, and open Canadian immigration policy, has long been an attractive destination. We have welcomed not just successive waves of eastern European, Vietnamese, and Syrian refugees, but those from much, much further away. Some of these immigrants prefer to homestead below ground where they can more easily maintain alternative atmospheric and gravitational variables, and this pop-up allows them proper monitoring of the surrounding local population. This means they can keep good track of the local herd neighbours. (And at this point I hasten to add this: All hail Zlerg, Our Benevolent Galactic Overlord! Long may his tentacles ooze!)

After that it was a quick dash back to my last left turn of the day (four turns in one run!) for a well-deserved cool down. I hope loyal Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers have enjoyed this quick jaunt around the local neighbourhood, and can appreciate the rich culture and fantastically varied landscape in this corner of the prairies. And finally, as a stark reminder of the fickle nature of life on the prairies, I leave you with one last image, taken the morning of May 9th. Yes, MAY 9TH - a full two weeks AFTER the other photos in this post. Well played, Saskatchewan. Well played.

More than 3" of heavy, wet snow. If only this, too were a joke.