Egg tarts around the world: a brief survey

When I was in Hamburg, Germany a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to come upon a pastry shop that sold egg tarts warm out of the oven.  They were just divine!  I think they were called pastéis de nata from the term used for them in Portugal, which seems to be the homeland (or one of the homelands) of this heavenly dessert.  Here the word pastéis is translated into English as "pastels", but it's something altogether different from the art medium, and it has a broad spectrum of manifestations as different types of pies and cakes.

Pastéis de nata were created before the 18th century by Catholic monks at the Jerónimos Monastery (Portuguese: Mosteiro dos Jerónimos) in the civil parish of Santa Maria de Belém, in Lisbon. These monks were originally based in France where these pastries could be found in local bakeries. At the time, convents and monasteries used large quantities of egg-whites for starching clothes, such as nuns' habits. It was quite common for monasteries and convents to use the leftover egg yolks to make cakes and pastries, resulting in the proliferation of sweet pastry recipes throughout the country.

(Wikipedia:  pastéis de nata)

The egg tart or custard tart is not to be confused with the custard pie, which has other ingredients beside milk, eggs, sugar, and salt added in, hence we have pumpkin pie, lemon and buttermilk chess pie, and coconut custard pie, etc., all of which are variants of custard pie.  The custard pie is the projectile of choice in the time-(dis)honored prank of pieing.

The earlier history of the egg custard tart goes back to old French croustade.

The development of custard is so intimately connected with the custard tart or pie that the word itself comes from the old French croustade, meaning a kind of pie. Some other names for varieties of custard tarts in the Middle Ages were doucettes and darioles. In 1399, the coronation banquet prepared for Henry IV included "doucettys"

(Wikipedia:  custard tart)

Close relatives of the custard tart and custard pie are flans pâtissier or just flans.

One of my favorite foods in Taiwan when I was living there between 1970 and 1972 was always dàntǎ 蛋塔, which looks like it means "egg stupa" (< zútǎpó 卒塔婆 / tǎpó 塔婆 < Skt. stūpa स्तूप / Pali thūpa), but in Hong Kong they are called dàntà ( daan6 taat3*1 蛋挞 / 撻 ("custard / egg tart"), where the taat¹ 挞 / 撻 (literally "flog; chastise") comes from "tart".  I suspect that dàntǎ 蛋塔 ("egg stupa") is an attempt by non-Cantonese speakers to make the name seem more rational from a Sinitic point of view, as though the shape of an egg tart somewhat resembles a stupa, which, by the way, basically means "heap" in Sanskrit.

Borrowed from Old French tarte (“flat pastry”) (Modern French tarte), from tourte, from Vulgar Latin *torta, from torta (“twisted”) panis (“bread”), from feminine of Latin tortus (“twisted, folded over”). Cognate to torta.

[VHM:  This tart that is a type of pastry is a completely separate word from the homographs that mean "sharp; acrid; sour" and "prostitute; woman of loose sexual morals" (see Wiktionary).

When I travelled in Central Asia during the 80s and 90s, I was always amused that "tart" became "tort" in languages like Uzbek and Uyghur, since in English "tort" is a type of civil wrong in common law jurisdictions.]

In Taipei, we lived back an alley off Hsin-sheng Nan Lu, which ran along the western side of National Taiwan University.  On Sunday mornings, we'd get up fairly early, have a bowl of congee*, and walk westward along Ho-ping Tung Lu toward National Taiwan Normal University.  When we were almost there, we'd start to smell the most heavenly aroma wafting from a bakery on the left side of the street.  It was one of the few shops that were open on Sunday at that hour.  We would follow our noses into the bakery and order half a dozen dàntǎ 蛋塔 straight out of the oven, and then slowly gorge ourselves on these sinfully delicious sweets.  On those days, there was no need to eat lunch.

To come full circle back to Philadelphia, we are blessed to have in our Chinatown the wonderful Bǎobǐng wū 飽餅屋 (I’m not sure of its English name), located on Race Street between N 10th Street and N 11th Street.  Their danta are excellent, and if you go there late in the afternoon, you can get them extra cheap.

*Readings

"Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 2" 11/30/16

"Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 3" 2/25/17

"Congee: the Dravidian roots of the name for a Chinese dish" (11/13/17)

[Thanks to Yixue Yang]