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; the filling may be sweet or savoury, though modern tarts are usually fruit-based, sometimes with custard. Tartlet refers to a miniature tart; an example would be egg tarts. The categories of "tart", " flan", and " pie" 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'', 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, meringue tart, tarte tatin and Bakewell tart. A ''jam tart'' uses jam in place of fresh fruit. '' Tarte Tatin'' is an upside-down tart, of apples, other fruit, or onions. Savoury tarts include quiche, a family of savoury tarts with a mostly custard filling; German Zwiebelkuchen 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 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 tart File:Tarte au riz.jpg, Rijstevlaai File:Blueberry tart.jpg, Blueberry 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 curd tart File:Egg Tarts with Puff Pastry.jpg, Egg tart 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