‘Come along, kiddie-winkies! Come and get your treacle tart,’ the Child Catcher trills in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to lure children away. The youngsters are particularly taken with the idea of treacle tart, and it’s not difficult to imagine why: unapologetically sweet and sticky, it’s irresistible to small, greedy hands.
It’s easy to dismiss treacle tart as a nursery food. But that, of course, is part of its charm. It’s the Platonic ideal of a childhood treat, and a byword for comfort. In Harry Potter, the love potion Amortentia smells of whatever someone loves most in the world; to Harry, it smells of broomsticks, Ginny Weasley’s hair and treacle tart, the first dessert he ever ate at Hogwarts.
Anyone making a treacle tart goes in with their eyes open. The first ingredient – a whole tin of golden syrup – is the giveaway: this is a dish with little light and shade. Attempting to make one that isn’t sweet is like trying to make a low-fat suet pastry, or a booze-free Long Island Iced Tea: you’re missing the whole point.
At first blush, the name ‘treacle tart’ is a misnomer, since few recipes for this dish call for what we now know as treacle. But once upon a time, ‘treacle’ was any liquid product of the sugar-refining process. In 1883, Charles Eastick found a way to turn the waste treacle at the Tate & Lyle factory in Plaistow into a honey-like syrup. This syrup was initially called ‘Goldie’ and sold on the cheap to factory workers and locals. But his boss, Abram Lyle, was a shrewd businessman. By 1885, he’d created the iconic green-and-gold tin, emblazoned with a Bible quote: ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness.’
The use of this cheap sugar by-product makes sense in this tart, a true waste-not-want-not pudding that uses stale bread to soak up the sweetness.
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