A New Sweet (to me, at least)

Tonight I made another small step toward assim­i­la­tion into Cana­dian cul­ture. Well, Cana­dian child­hood cul­ture, at least.

Shortly after we arrived here, I saw in the cof­fee shops and the occa­sional restau­rant a dessert called a Nanaimo Bar. This piqued my curios­ity, since I knew of the port of Nanaimo, a city on Van­cou­ver Island, as well as the name of a Street and Sta­tion I often see on the local busses and hear in a some­what taunt­ing tone on the Skytrain’s auto­mated announce­ment system.

Dur­ing the show­ing of “A Sou­venir of Canada”, a movie based on the book by Dou­glas Cou­p­land dur­ing the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val, the image of this box flashed on the screen, and sev­eral in the audi­ence gave gasps of recog­ni­tion and laughed. Here’s the cur­rent def­i­n­i­tion of Nanaimo bar I got from the Wikipedia:

The Nanaimo bar is a Cana­dian dessert. A type of choco­late cake, it receives its name from the city of Nanaimo, British Colum­bia, where it first became known in the 1930s. It con­sists of a crumb-based layer, topped by a light cus­tard which is cov­ered in soft choco­late. Many vari­eties are pos­si­ble by using dif­fer­ent types of crumb, flavours of cus­tard, and types of choco­late.
Accord­ing to his­tor­i­cal leg­end, a group of friends in Nanaimo, who would later found the Hare­wood Ladies’ Aux­il­iary, found the recipe in the Van­cou­ver Sun under the name “choco­late fridge cake,” and pop­u­lar­ized it under the name Nanaimo bar. How­ever, a search through the newspaper’s archives failed to turn up the recipe, so its ulti­mate ori­gin is unknown.
Recipes for sim­i­lar desserts are found in var­i­ous places and under var­i­ous names in North Amer­ica and Europe, but only in Canada is it so widely known, and it is known to Cana­di­ans only as the Nanaimo bar.
The City of Nanaimo takes its Nanaimo bars very seri­ously; the city’s mas­cot is known as Nanaimo Bar­ney and has the shape of a giant Nanaimo bar. The city also has an offi­cial recipe for the bar. In 1985, Mayor Graeme Roberts started a con­test to find the ulti­mate Nanaimo bar recipe; the unan­i­mous win­ner, sub­mit­ted by local res­i­dent Joyce Hard­cas­tle, was declared the offi­cial recipe and is avail­able as a hand­out from the City.

I’ve tried them in some places since then. They have dif­fered slightly, but in gen­eral they are all sweet, have dif­fer­ent ratios of fill­ing to top­ping and crumb bot­tom layer, and some have more coconut in that layer than oth­ers. The choco­late also varies from recipe to recipe. It’s been fun to try dif­fer­ent ver­sions to com­pare them, even though it’s kind of like an adult order­ing a twinkies or marsh­mal­low treats. When I saw the box at the IGA, I decided it was time that I tried mak­ing them first as the aver­age Cana­dian has prob­a­bly tasted them. Then, I’ll try the orig­i­nal recipe.
The instruc­tions (in Eng­lish and French, of course), essen­tially call for the con­tents of bags A, B, and C cor­re­spond­ing to the base, fill­ing and top­ping respec­tively, mixed with but­ter in dif­fer­ent amounts. No bak­ing is involved, as the box says.

The results were achingly sweet and the fill­ing had an unpleas­ant grainy tex­ture. You wouldn’t want to read the ingre­di­ents on the side of the box, and it’s likely more than one case of type 2 dia­betes resulted from ingest­ing too many of these, but I guess that a rite of pas­sage of sorts has been achieved, albeit about 30-odd years too late. I’ll never be a native Cana­dian, nor will I have had a child­hood with these in it, but they are a fun new discovery.