A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a

pastry Pastry refers to a variety of Dough, doughs (often enriched with fat or eggs), as well as the sweet and savoury Baking, baked goods made from them. The dough may be accordingly called pastry dough for clarity. Sweetened pastries are often descr ...

base with an open top not covered with pastry. The pastry is usually

shortcrust pastry Shortcrust is a type of pastry often used for the base of a tart, quiche, pie, or (in the British English sense) flan. Shortcrust pastry can be used to make both sweet and savory pies such as apple pie, quiche, lemon meringue or chicken pie. ...

; the filling may be sweet or savoury, though modern tarts are usually fruit-based, sometimes with

custard Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on sweetened milk, cheese, or cream cooked with Eggs as food, egg or egg yolk to thicken it, and sometimes also flour, corn starch, or gelatin. Depending on the recipe, custard may vary in con ...

. Tartlet refers to a miniature tart; an example would be

egg tart The egg tart (; ) is a kind of custard tart found in Chinese cuisine, derived from the English custard tart and Portuguese pastel de nata. The dish consists of an outer pastry crust filled with egg custard. Egg tarts are often served at di ...

s. The categories of "tart", " flan", and "

pie A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies may be filled with fruit (as in an apple pie), nuts ( pecan pie), fruit preserves ( jam tart ...

" overlap, with no sharp distinctions.

History

Akashi City Museum of Culture Hyogo pref Japan13s

The French word ''tarte'' can be translated to mean either pie or tart, as both are mainly the same except a pie usually covers the filling in pastry, while flans and tarts leave it open. While many tarts are also

tart A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a pastry base with an open top not covered with pastry. The pastry is usually shortcrust pastry; the filling may be sweet or savoury, though modern tarts are usually fruit-based, sometimes with ...

, in the sense of sour in taste, this appears to be a coincidence; the etymologies of the two senses of the word are quite separate. Tarts are thought to have either come from a tradition of layering food or to be a product of

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...

pie making. Enriched dough (i.e. shortcrust) is thought to have been first commonly used in 1550, approximately 200 years after pies. In this period, they were viewed as high-cuisine, popular with nobility, in contrast to the view of a commoner's pie. While originally savory, with meat fillings, culinary tastes led to sweet tarts prevailing, filling tarts instead with fruit and custard. Early medieval tarts generally had meat fillings, but later ones were often based on fruit and custard. An early tart was the Italian ''

crostata ''Crostata'' () is an Italian baked tart or pie. The earliest known use of ''crostata'' in its modern sense can be traced to the cookbooks ''Libro de Arte Coquinaria'' (''Book of the Art of Cooking'') by Martino da Como, published , and ''C ...

'', dating to at least the mid-15th century. It has been described as a "rustic free-form version of an open fruit tart".

Description

Tarts are typically free-standing with firm pastry base consisting of dough, itself made of flour, thick filling, and perpendicular sides while pies may have softer pastry, looser filling, and sloped sides, necessitating service from the pie plate.

Varieties

There are many types of tarts, with popular varieties including

Treacle tart Treacle tart is a traditional British dessert. The earliest known recipe for the dessert is from English author Mary Jewry in her cookbooks from the late 19th century. Desserts It is prepared using shortcrust pastry, with a thick filling made ...

, meringue tart, tarte tatin and

Bakewell tart The Bakewell tart is a traditional British dessert originating from the town of Bakewell in the Peak District, England. It consists of a shortcrust pastry shell filled with layers of jam and frangipane—a sweet almond-flavoured custard—topp ...

. A ''jam tart'' uses

jam Fruit preserves are preparations of fruits whose main preserving agent is sugar and sometimes acid, often stored in glass jars and used as a condiment or spread. There are many varieties of fruit preserves globally, distinguished by the meth ...

in place of fresh fruit. '' Tarte Tatin'' is an upside-down tart, of apples, other fruit, or onions. Savoury tarts include

quiche Quiche ( ) is a French tart consisting of a pastry crust filled with savoury custard and pieces of cheese, meat, seafood or vegetables. A well-known variant is quiche lorraine, which includes lardons or bacon. Quiche may be served hot, wa ...

, a family of savoury tarts with a mostly custard filling; German

Zwiebelkuchen (, ) is a savory German onion cake made of steamed onions, diced bacon, cream, and caraway seeds on either a yeast or leavened dough. It is not to be confused with Flammkuchen, a similar dish that is dryer. History Most of Zwiebelkuchen's ...

and

Alsace Alsace (, ; ) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in the Grand Est administrative region of northeastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine, next to Germany and Switzerland. In January 2021, it had a population of 1,9 ...

Tarte à l'oignon or is a savoury tart with a baked filling of onions and cream. It is a speciality of the French region of Alsace, and may be served hot, warm or at room temperature. It is typically served as a starter. Background and ingredients Onion pastr ...

or ZewelwaïDavid, pp. 184–185 (onion tarts), and Swiss cheese tart made from Gruyère.

Gallery

File:Strawberry tart by Kirti Poddar.jpg,

Strawberry The garden strawberry (or simply strawberry; ''Fragaria × ananassa'') is a widely grown Hybrid (biology), hybrid plant cultivated worldwide for its fruit. The genus ''Fragaria'', the strawberries, is in the rose family, Rosaceae. The fruit ...

tart File:Chocolate tarts by Tammy Green.jpg,

Chocolate Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cocoa beans that can be a liquid, solid, or paste, either by itself or to flavoring, flavor other foods. Cocoa beans are the processed seeds of the cacao tree (''Theobroma cacao''); unprocesse ...

tart File:Mexican blackberry tart by yoko.jpg, Mexican

blackberry BlackBerry is a discontinued brand of handheld devices and related mobile services, originally developed and maintained by the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM, later known as BlackBerry Limited) until 2016. The first BlackBerry device ...

tart File:Tarte au riz.jpg,

Rijstevlaai In Dutch and Belgian cuisine, ''rijsttaart(je)''/''rijstevlaai'' (Dutch) or ''tarte au riz'' (French) (, all translate to “rice flan”) is a pie with a filling based on rice pudding. It is native to Verviers and popular around the wider regi ...

File:Blueberry tart.jpg,

Blueberry Blueberries are a widely distributed and widespread group of perennial flowering plants with blue or purple berries. They are classified in the section ''Cyanococcus'' with the genus ''Vaccinium''. Commercial blueberries—both wild (lowbush) ...

and

raspberry The raspberry is the edible fruit of several plant species in the genus ''Rubus'' of the Rosaceae, rose family, most of which are in the subgenus ''Rubus#Modern classification, Idaeobatus''. The name also applies to these plants themselves. Ras ...

tart File:Cranberry Curd Tart.png,

Cranberry Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines in the subgenus ''Oxycoccus'' of the genus ''Vaccinium''. Cranberries are low, creeping shrubs or vines up to long and in height; they have slender stems that are not th ...

curd tart File:Egg Tarts with Puff Pastry.jpg,

Egg tart The egg tart (; ) is a kind of custard tart found in Chinese cuisine, derived from the English custard tart and Portuguese pastel de nata. The dish consists of an outer pastry crust filled with egg custard. Egg tarts are often served at di ...

File:tarteFR.hk.jpg, Tarte fruits rouges File:Cheese tarts on display at Sendai Station, Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.jpg,

Hokkaido is the list of islands of Japan by area, second-largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefectures of Japan, prefecture, making up its own list of regions of Japan, region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō fr ...

cheese tarts from

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

History

Description

Varieties

Gallery

See also

Notes

References

External links