Butter tart, strawberry tart, blueberry tart, and chocolate tart…. so many kinds of tarts to choose from. Want to know more about tarts? Keep on reading then.
A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a pastry base with an open top not covered with pastry. A tart is different from a pie in a sense that a pie is a sweet or savory dish with a crust and a filling while a tart is the same dish with shallow sides and only a bottom crust. However, while pies and tarts are two distinct things, they are close enough cousins and later, you will discover how they are different historically. Now we focus on how it all started.
There are two possible origins of tarts. One posits that tarts have evolved out of the “putting things on top of other things” tradition where it is believed that tarts originated from people who have been experimenting putting foodstuffs on top of other foodstuffs and subsequently trying them out. The second school of thought maintains that tarts spring from the Medieval pie-making tradition, and are in fact a kind of flat, open-faced pie.
Pies and tarts differ in that while pie was a commoner’s sort of fare while tarts were the pastries of high cuisine. Which is to say, they were extremely popular among the nobility. In fact, court cooks employed tarts not so much for their taste but because of their looks.
In the past few years where culinary diversity has been prominent, tarts have also taken a new path, the sweet direction. New tart innovations focused mainly on citrus tarts like the orange and lemon types and there are many more of its kind today than before. It’s important not to forget the tart’s famous savory cousins though, the quiches!
Are you yourself all about tarts too? Do you have a must-try tart recipe? Do share it with us!
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