I have some great memories of road trips, postage-stamp dives, and bagging burgers and cheap beer back to roadside motels off highways and main streets of tiny little towns. You accept accommodations like this when you are 23 and traveling on a dime or if you are 53 and exploring the country by motorcycle. It’s alright to stay in ‘okay’ places, but I adore luxury hotels, high thread counts, turndowns, and room service - where they bring truffley things and imported bottles straight to your door. You only have to stay in a boutique hotel once to be ruined.
I’ve heard the same thing about flying first class. If you do it just once, you will never be satisfied with pedestrian business class again. I’m willing to try and find out for myself.
A salon cut spoils you Cheap Cuts. A world-class theatre experience dulls the productions of hometown playhouses. Good wine beats a bottle of barrel wash every time. But if you’ve only ever uncapped barrel wash, you might not know that headaches aren’t supposed to be part of the wine-loving experience. Eat an apple under its tree, and you’ll be disappointed by anything the grocery store can offer forever more. Some things ruin the ordinary for good.
When it happens, you advance your level of expectation. The bar by which you measure all future experiences rises. Sometimes to impossible standards.
The standard for butter tarts in my life is off the charts. Not because I make the best or because my Grandma made the best. It’s not because I ate a butter tart at a world-class restaurant where they serve dessert on slate plates with sprinkles of gold leaf and cloches of fog. The bar for butter tarts is hiding in a clamshell takeout container on the office common-room credenza.
Inside are the most luxurious, finely crafted butter tarts I’ve ever encountered. They come from some obscure general store somewhere in Southwestern Ontario. I can’t tell you exactly where because I only know the general vicinity. The procurer is not overly forthcoming with the precise location. Fishermen are like this, hinting around but never revealing their trophy-winning shoals. I can't blame them. If I found gold that made me glow in the hearts of my peers, I would have an equal reluctance to hand over directions.
The butter tarts are perfect. Sweet but not cloying. The filling-to-pecan ratio is precisely correct. The gooey bit is just the right stage of runny. For my taste, that consistency is just between staying in place unmoving and dripping on your napkin. They are just the right size - leaving you one bite short of 'I couldn’t eat another.’
But the trait that seals these butter tarts is their shell. I’ve never had anything like it, especially in a butter tart. Most come with a thick shortbread-like crust, a pâte sucrée style pressed in place, sweet with mountains of butter. Some people make the crust with traditional pie dough, cut with shortening - pasty, bland, and entirely utilitarian. The worst crusts are baked in foil, preventing any development of browning. Oh, but the shells of these - best-in-the-world butter tarts are simply divine. They are thin-walled and crisp, with pebbly pockets of air trapped between layers. All butter tarts should be so lucky.
My sciencey baking brain eats fully engaged, almost in overdrive, bordering right on the edge of ruining the best experience in butter tarts a person can enjoy. Every bite neatly dissected - lard or shortening? Lard for sure - (maybe) - I think. The pastry is rolled - obviously, paper-thin, and cut with a scalloped edge cutter. There is sugar in there - a pleasant amount. You can tell from the sweetness and browning. The oven temperature must be high for baking. Crust so crisp does not happen without heat. I contemplate how they balance the doneness of the filling without over-cooking the shells. It must be the ratio again. And a good pan, the pans must be heavy gauge and blackened with seasoned use. I make notes like a sommelier scrutinizing a world-class bottle of Cabernet.
I will recreate this tart one day. I will channel my inner Einstein and find a thousand ways to fail, but I will not rest until I develop a family recipe for the best butter tarts this side of an obscure little general store somewhere in Ontario.
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