Ontario
Butter tarts: gooey, flaky, sweet.
Butter Tart
The butter tart — a flaky pastry shell filled with a gooey mix of butter, sugar and egg — is English-Canada's quintessential home bake.
View page →Ontario is English-Canada's heartland — Toronto and Ottawa sit here — and its food is an English base overlaid with immigrant and Indigenous threads. The home staple is the butter tart: a flaky shell filled with a gooey mix of butter, sugar and egg (often with raisins or pecans), a bake every Canadian grows up on. Peameal bacon — pork loin rolled in yellow pea meal — is the St. Lawrence Market's breakfast sandwich, Toronto's own. Wild rice (actually a grass seed) is an Indigenous staple of the Great Lakes, protein-rich and nutty. Ukrainian-Canadian pyrohy arrived with the late-19th-century diaspora. And the much-debated Hawaiian pizza was invented in 1962 by a Greek-Canadian restaurateur in Ontario — a fact Canadians wear with mixed pride.
The Palate
Start Here
Flaky pastry with a gooey butter-sugar-egg filling, optionally raisin or pecan.
Why start here · English-Canada's home bake in one tart.
Pea-meal-crusted pork loin on a bun, the St. Lawrence Market breakfast.
Why start here · Toronto on a roll.
Ham and pineapple pizza, a 1962 Ontario invention that conquered the world.
Why start here · The dish Canada gave the world, for better or worse.
The Pantry
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Herbs & Spices
Grains & Staples
Sauces & Condiments
How They Cook
Techniques that define this cuisine
Other regions
Siblings within Canadian — each its own tradition.