If enough butter tart lovers take action, there could soon be a day celebrating the iconic Canadian treat.

John Meissner, of Grimsby in Niagara Region, has loved butter tarts since he was a little boy living at a farm in Guelph, Ont. But it wasn’t until he had an offensively bad butter tart while judging at a festival in February that he decided he needed to do something to conserve the original recipe of the dessert.

“All six judges, after we took a bite, we just spat it right back out on the plate,” he told CBC Hamilton. 

“It was so bad, and I’m like, ‘If this is what people are selling as butter tarts, that’s concerning.'” 

Now, with the help of the Simcoe North Member of Parliament Adam Chambers, Meissner is trying to make a national butter tart day happen on April 19 in order to “protect” the legacy of the woman believed to have come up with the original butter tart filling recipe.

He’s doing so with a formal petition to the House of Commons that needs at least 500 signatures by June 25 so that Chambers can bring it forward in Parliament.

An ode to the 1st recorded butter tart recipe

Meissner said he grew up eating food made with simple, non-processed ingredients, including butter tarts his mom, Dolores Bauman, made for him.

“She’d make a tray of a dozen butter tarts. They were gone by the end of the day easily because they were so good,” he said.

According to the County of Simcoe, the first known public recipe for a butter tart filling was from a Barrie, Ont., woman named Mary MacLeod, who documented it in the Women’s Auxiliary of Royal Victoria Hospital in 1900.

MacLeod died on April 19, 1915, which is why Meissner thought it would make a good date to mark the day, not just to celebrate the pastry, but also to commemorate MacLeod.

The two-line recipe is straight forward: mix one cup of sugar, half a cup of butter, two eggs, one cup of currants, then “fill the tarts and bake.”

A recipe for the buttery pastry, which the book labels as “puff paste” is also in there, two entries above MacLeod’s recipe.

Wanting to know how butter tarts ended up going downhill from the simple ingredients MacLeod wrote in 1900, Meissner went down a rabbit hole of processed foods, corn syrup and shortcuts that brought him to today. 

Meissner said just like Québécois take the poutine seriously and British Columbians don’t mess about the Nanaimo bar, Ontarians and Canada should band together to protect the butter tart.

Pecans or raisins?

Meissner’s family came to Waterloo 200 years ago from Germany, he said, and remained connected to the region. He said as part of the movement, he wanted to make sure this part of his pioneering heritage was protected.

“I started thinking to myself, ‘well, how do we preserve Mary’s legacy?'” he said.

He ended up finding the petition process and reached out to Chambers, who replied very quickly.

“Anytime I receive correspondence about butter tarts my interest is immediately piqued,” Chambers told CBC Hamilton. “Because Midland, Ont., hosts what I consider and what many consider to be the premier butter tart festival.”

Ontario’s Best Butter Tart Festival in the Town of Midland is a huge deal in the community. It sees thousands of people and many more butter tarts each year. This year, the festival is on June 13.

Chambers sees the holiday has potential to bring people together.

“Have some discussions about raisins or no raisins or pecans or no pecans, those are the arguments we should be having as Canadians,” he said.

Although Chambers said he wouldn’t answer the “very divisive question” of whether he likes pecans on them or not, he does like how diverse they can be.

What makes the perfect butter tart?

Meissner is a voice actor, but he’s very passionate about butter tarts and food in general, becoming a bit of a food critic who has also judged at local butter tart festivals.

He said a good butter tart, first of all, has to look good. It also needs a good crust, which has to have a buttery element to it, “otherwise it’s just a tart,” and it can’t be store-bought, he said.

As for the filling, it has to be firm.

“If I’m eating a butter tart, when I bite into [it], the filling needs to stay in the tart,” said Meissner.

He has tried many butter tarts. Some stand out and have been widely recommended to him, like the Butter Tart Shack in Port Colborne, Strom’s Farm & Bakery in Guelph, and Anna Mae’s Bakery & Restaurant in Millbank.

For a non-traditional butter tart, Meissner recommended Doodoo’s Bakery’s haskap berry butter tart, which he said is “divine.”

But the best butter tart he’s ever had came from his mother. She died in 1995, but Meissner can still remember watching in awe as she made holiday dinners.

“Her hands would just be going and doing things and she wouldn’t need a recipe book because it was all inside of her [head],” he said.

He has tried making them himself following Bauman’s recipe, which he said are “OK.” 

However, his own children “gobble them up” much like he and his own siblings did at that Guelph farm.