Nanaimo bar: three layers, no oven, and an official recipe

Overview

A Nanaimo bar is a small cold square in three distinct layers, and the whole of its character is in the fact that none of them is baked.

The base is crushed biscuit — digestive or graham — bound with melted butter, cocoa, desiccated coconut, chopped walnuts and beaten egg, pressed into a tin and chilled until it holds. The middle is a pale yellow buttercream stiffened with custard powder, which is what gives the bar its particular flavour: not vanilla exactly, but the specific perfume of tinned custard, and it is unmistakable to anyone raised on it. The top is plain chocolate, melted with a little butter and poured over, then set in the fridge until it cracks when cut.

Cold, dense, very sweet, and eaten in two-inch squares. That is the entire object.

It has nothing to do with Toronto and the city does not claim it. Nanaimo is a town on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, on the other coast of a country that takes five hours to fly across, and the bar is that town’s. What Toronto has is what every large Canadian city has: the bar as a national bakery-counter fixture, sold in cafés and delis and supermarket bakeries from one end of the country to the other, entirely divorced from its origin. That is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. It is here because it went everywhere.

The origin is unusually well documented for a home-baking recipe. Versions of a three-layer no-bake square circulated in community and church cookbooks in the middle of the twentieth century; what settled the matter was a contest run by the town of Nanaimo in 1986 to find a definitive recipe. Nearly a hundred entries were submitted, and the winning one, from Joyce Hardcastle, has been the town’s official recipe ever since. That is a real, dated, checkable fact — rare in this genre, where the usual story is an unverifiable claim about a housewife and a magazine.

What to order

There is only one thing to say — a Nanaimo bar — and the interest is entirely in what you are handed. Three things to look at through the glass:

• The layers should be roughly even in thickness, with the crumb base the thickest of the three. A thick middle layer is a bakery being generous with the cheapest ingredient, and it makes the bar cloying.
• The chocolate top should be thin. Thick set chocolate does not yield to a fork or to a bite; it shatters and takes the middle layer with it. A good one is a couple of millimetres.
• The base should show its parts. You want to see coconut and nut in the cross-section. A smooth, uniform brown base is biscuit crumb and butter with the interesting bits left out.

Variants exist and are worth knowing before you are surprised. Mint and peanut butter versions substitute the flavouring in the middle layer; both are common in cafés and neither is the original. Where a nut allergy is a concern, ask — walnuts in the base are standard, and coconut is not optional at all.

It is served cold and should be. At room temperature the middle layer softens to the point of sliding, which is why the bar is kept in a chilled cabinet and why one that has been out on a counter all afternoon looks slumped.

Coffee is the pairing, and a black one: this is a very sweet thing and milky coffee doubles down on it.

What to avoid

The chief risk is not fraud, it is industry. A Nanaimo bar is trivially easy to mass-produce — nothing is baked, everything is stable, and the shelf life is long. The wrapped supermarket version is made with vegetable-fat coating instead of chocolate and an icing-sugar filling with no custard powder in it, and the tell is on the top: real set chocolate is glossy, snaps and melts on the tongue; compound coating is duller, waxy, and leaves a film. Look at the cut edge under the light.

Second: the oversized café slab. A bar this rich was designed as a small square from a tray cut into thirty. Where it arrives as a wedge the size of a paperback, the ratios have been kept and the sugar simply multiplied, and nobody finishes it.

Third, a specific Toronto caution rather than a general one. In a city where a great many counters sell a great many squares, the Nanaimo bar is often the slowest-moving item in the case, because locals think of it as a childhood thing. A bar that has been sitting for days develops a dried, pale bloom on the chocolate and a base that has gone hard rather than firm. In a busy bakery this never happens; in a quiet café on a tourist street it is the default state.

If the price is well above what a large coffee costs in the same shop, you are paying for the cabinet it sat in.

Practicalities

Reckon on roughly $3 to $6 a square at a bakery or café, less from a supermarket bakery counter, more where it has been made oversized. There is nothing costly in it — biscuit, butter, sugar, cocoa — so a high price reflects the room and the labour of cutting, not the ingredients.

It is an afternoon food, and the natural moment is the coffee break rather than dessert after a meal. Bakeries make trays in the morning and cut them through the day; the best squares come from a tray that is visibly half sold, because that means both freshness and turnover.

No season, but a genuine temperature rule that is worth acting on: this is a bar that lives or dies on being cold, and Toronto’s summers are hot and humid. Between June and September, buy it somewhere with a proper chilled case and eat it there rather than carrying it; in winter it travels perfectly well in a bag, which is the half of the year when taking a box of them somewhere makes sense.

Cards work everywhere and contactless is the norm; almost nobody handles cash for a single square. Buy one, not four — this is a dessert that seems small and is not, and the second one is always a worse idea than it looks.