Mince Tarts

Neither of us can say exactly when it started, but my wee sister has baked mince tarts for me every Christmas since … I think before she had her kids. The badgering starts in November.

Me: “I’m getting tarts, right?”

She (rolling eyes and sighing): “Yeeeees.”

“ ’Cause I don’t care about getting anything else.”

Heavier, dare I say beleagured, sigh. “Yeeeees.”

She has asked why it matters so much, but I’m unable to tell her. I use the pastry as an excuse. Light, flaky, crispy in all the right places. Yum. She always looks puzzled and says, “I just follow the recipe,” sounding hopeful that if I try it, I might quit bugging her and make the darned things myself.

I have tried and I haven’t quit and so the annual tradition continues. Gods bless her, despite chronic pain, scrambling to do Christmas for her own family, and working fulltime to December 24, she always manages to get the tarts done. Last year, she shoved the snowflake tin at me and growled, “Here’re your freakin’ tarts.” To which I replied with a gleeful squeal, clutching the tin to my chest, “Thanks, kid!”

This November (or is it last November?), I reluctantly let her off the hook. Gluten-free means no more light flaky crispy pastry, so when the inevitable Christmas prep talk came up, I thought she’d be relieved to hear that she was no longer obliged to bake for me. I wasn’t wholly sure, but she seemed disappointed. We talked a bit more about the diet and she wondered if it might help relieve her inflammation, then we let the matter go.

On December 19, while standing in line at the coffee shop, she told me that Mum and Dad would do her prezzie drop this year, as they were coming to my place for tea on Christmas Eve. I nodded and said I’d figured as much, given time constraints and whatnot. Then she said, “Oh, and I baked your mince tarts.”

I stared at her. “What? How?”

“Gluten-free pastry mix. They look like hell, but they’re tart-shaped. You say it’s about the pastry, so I don’t know if they’ll be any good …”

I would have thrown myself into her arms and burst into overwhelmed tears, but our family doesn’t operate that way. I kept my cool (I hope) instead, joking, “I can always pour custard on them.”

Custard being the ubiquitous fix for any substandard sweet.

When the tin arrived with the parents on Christmas Eve, yep, it was heavy as an Olympic dumbbell weight and the contents were indeed tart-shaped, but they didn’t look as bad as she had described. I did my usual thing and waited until teatime on Christmas Day before sampling one. The crust was crumbly rather than flaky, more a short crust than a pie crust. It held up under fork pressure and the mincemeat was as thick and sticky and spicy and delicious as always. The custard was just a nice addition, not a covert necessity. In fact, this year’s tarts taste better than in all the years previous.

Know why?

She didn’t have to do it, but she did it anyway. She found a way to bake me my Christmas mince tarts. She knows it’s not about pastry, or even about tradition. It’s about love.

Thanks, wee ’un.