Nanaimo bars: the history, the official recipe and the disputed origin

In 1952, the Women's Auxiliary to the Nanaimo Hospital published a cookbook of recipes from people in the city and beyond. One of them described a square with a base of graham crumbs, cocoa, nuts and coconut, a middle layer of buttercream flavoured with custard powder, and a chocolate top. It was called a "chocolate square". Almost everything about Nanaimo bars history since then, the name, the fame and the arguments, starts with that page.

This account follows what the record shows: the first known recipe, how the name appeared, the claims that compete with Nanaimo's, how the bar spread across the country, and the official Nanaimo bar recipe the city adopted in the 1980s.

A dessert from the hospital auxiliary

The 1952 cookbook is the earliest known printed recipe for what became Nanaimo bars, according to the Times Colonist and to food researcher Lenore Newman of the University of the Fraser Valley, who published a study of the bar's origins in Canadian Food Studies in 2014.

Newman's conclusion was cautious. The bar, she wrote, was "likely developed by a member or members of the Nanaimo Hospital Auxiliary". Community cookbooks of that period make certainty difficult. Many small church and auxiliary cookbooks stayed in private hands, recipes were copied word for word from one book to the next, and the same square could travel to a new town under a new name.

Newman places the bar in the tradition of "dainties": small sweet treats of the period, served at home by what she calls a blue-collar middle class.

Three recipes in one cookbook

The 1952 cookbook is more interesting than a single entry. According to Newman, it contains three nearly identical recipes for the dessert, each differing only slightly from the modern bar: two called Chocolate Square and one called Chocolate Slice. The one closest to today's version was submitted by a Mrs. E. MacDougall.

Newman and an archival researcher, Shea Wind, searched 48 cookbooks drawn from archives in British Columbia, online collections and local collections in Nanaimo. None contained a Nanaimo bar, or a similar recipe, older than 1952. The hospital auxiliary's own minutes are archived, so there is no doubt the group existed. That is more than can be said for a rival source repeated widely online: a Ladysmith and Cowichan Women's Institute cookbook that, Newman found, has never been located, with no evidence that such an organisation ever existed.

A lead from the 1980s pointed in the same direction. In the mid-1980s the Nanaimo Chamber of Commerce tried to establish the bar's origin and recorded that Phyliss Millgan, a member of the hospital auxiliary, said the recipe first appeared in the auxiliary's cookbook and was based on a Vancouver Sun recipe for a Chocolate Fridge Cake.

How Nanaimo bars got their name

The name came after the recipe. On April 11, 1953, the Vancouver Sun printed a reader's recipe, submitted by a Mrs. David Orr, as the London Fog Bar, Newman found. The column, written under the Edith Adams name, added a note that these were also called Nanaimo bars. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles quotes a 1953 recipe under the name "London Smog Bars" with the same note, "These are also called Nanaimo Bars", signed with Edith Adams's initials.

The same year, the 14th edition of the Edith Adams cookbook printed the recipe as Nanaimo bars. The Times Colonist reports that a copy of that book is on display at the Nanaimo Museum.

Edith Adams herself never existed. The Vancouver Sun invented the name in 1924 for its recipe and homemaking column, and generations of reporters and editors wrote under it, the Times Colonist notes, citing the Sun. How the column came to give the bars their alternate name is not known. Newman suggested the recipe may have been submitted under different names by several contestants in the column's daily recipe contest.

The recipe that came before

Newman's archival search went further back, into Vancouver Sun recipes from 1930 to 1960. She found no recipe for a Nanaimo bar, or for the "chocolate fridge cake" that a member of the hospital auxiliary had once named as its source, in the paper before 1953. What she did find were two recipes for what is now the bar's bottom layer.

On April 18, 1947, a Mrs. Lois Light of Vancouver submitted a Chocolate Quickie Square, to be frosted with peppermint butter icing. A similar base appeared again in February 1948. Those unbaked chocolate squares, Newman argued, suggest where the bar began, and date its development in Nanaimo to the late 1940s.

Her view of what Nanaimo actually added is the most interesting part of the study. The real innovation, she wrote, was "most likely the invention of the custard frosting": the pale yellow middle layer that makes the bar recognisable.

Wildwood, New Zealand and a new frosting

The second base recipe Newman found came from across the water. On February 21, 1948, Jean Haines of Wildwood submitted a recipe to the Vancouver Sun for an Unbaked Chocolate Cake that she said came from New Zealand; it was reprinted in the 12th Edith Adams prize cookbook. Newman pointed out that Nanaimo and Wildwood are both mill towns, on opposite sides of the Strait of Georgia.

She added one more clue. The first Nanaimo bar recipe in the Sun calls the middle layer a "special icing" rather than a filling. Put together, the evidence led her to conclude that the women of the hospital auxiliary most likely created the bar by adapting the earlier cake recipe, inventing a new frosting and capping the square with chocolate. A recipe from before 1947 might still turn up, she wrote, but she thought it doubtful.

Rival claims and the Nanaimo bars history debate

Nanaimo's claim has competition, and the competition has come from more than one direction.

Jean Paré, creator of the Company's Coming cookbooks, claimed the bars were originally called smog bars and came from Alberta. Newman took the claim seriously enough to search Albertan cookbooks of the period and found no reference to smog bars or fog bars of any kind. The Dictionary of Canadianisms also quotes a printed Nanaimo bar recipe from 1954, but any 1954 source is later than both the 1952 Nanaimo cookbook and the 1953 Vancouver Sun note.

Within Nanaimo, there is another candidate. A transcription published in 1999, quoted in the Dictionary of Canadianisms, describes a recipe in a cookbook from the Women's Association of Brechin United Church, crediting a Joy Willgress of Nanaimo. That book carries no date; its advertising suggested about 1955, which would make it later than the hospital auxiliary's 1952 recipe.

Then there are the stories. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, newspapers were repeating versions in which a Vancouver Island housewife entered a magazine contest and named her squares after her town out of civic pride. The Dictionary of Canadianisms records those accounts from 1988 and 1992. Newman's study treats them as what folklorists call "fakelore": appealing stories that fill a gap in the record without documentation behind them.

Other names across Canada

Newman's search turned up a range of names for the same square in other places. A Mrs. Ruby Polych of Drumheller called them Victoria Specials in a 1957 Salvation Army cookbook; a Mrs. Harold Payne of Nova Scotia called them Mabel's Squares in a 1954 Women's Institute cookbook; and a 1977 article in the Winnipeg Free Press called them the New York Slice, the only reference to that name her team found. After Expo 86, she noted, later cookbooks almost always printed the recipe as Nanaimo Bar rather than a variation.

A family of no-bake squares

Part of the difficulty is that the bar was never alone. After the Second World War, when rationing ended and butter and sugar were easier to buy, unbaked squares of this kind came back into fashion in Canada and elsewhere, the Times Colonist explains. Versions went by names such as chocolate slice, New York slice, Mabel's squares, prayer bars and London fog bar.

In Canada, the version called the Nanaimo bar became the most famous. Newman's explanation is partly about luck and partly about branding. The bar survived, she wrote, "from the action of a few individuals, and from the attraction of the name", an example of what researchers call cultural proximity, in which a product takes on the identity of a place.

Trifles, charlottes and icebox cakes

The Nanaimo bar sits at the end of a long line of desserts made without an oven. Newman traces it back as far as the Roman cookery writer Apicius, who described a dish of bread crumbs soaked in wine, mixed with cheese and chilled in a mould packed in snow. English trifle, with stale sponge cake, custard, jam and cream, dates to at least the late 16th century and led to the charlotte, which still filled cookbooks into the 1930s.

From the charlotte came the icebox or refrigerator cake. In the books her team examined, Newman noted a shift from ladyfingers as the base to other options, including crushed or whole graham crackers. Quick refrigerator squares became extremely popular after the Second World War, and by 1950 graham rolls and graham marshmallow squares appeared in almost every book studied.

A dainty of its time

Newman's term for the bar is a "dainty", a small, rich, hand-held sweet served at home or at public events such as church suppers. These squares exploded in popularity after the war, she wrote, and making them was a matter of status as much as taste. Entertaining was expected, the food was often fancy and time-consuming, and using ready-made ingredients signalled prosperity rather than saving time.

The Nanaimo bar fitted that pattern exactly. It was already costly because of its butter and sugar, it took time and care to make, and it combined as many as five branded products: Graham crackers, Bird's custard powder, Baker's chocolate, Fry's cocoa and Tropic coconut. Historians of the period, Newman notes, call such foods "populux", products of a postwar optimism about science and brand-name convenience.

By the mid-1950s, according to Newman, Nanaimo itself had moved on from the coal mines that built the town: the town's economy was dominated by pulp and paper, which created a solid blue-collar middle class, the same households that served dainties at home.

From Vancouver cafés to Expo 86

The individuals included Susan Mendelson of Vancouver. According to the Times Colonist, citing an article by Brad Dunne on the Canadian Encyclopedia website, Mendelson sold Nanaimo bars in the 1970s to help pay her tuition, and in 1979 founded The Lazy Gourmet, a café and catering company that claims to be the first business to sell them. When Expo 86 came to Vancouver, she wrote the event's official cookbook and included a recipe for the bars. Newman's account puts the number higher, at three Nanaimo bar recipes in the Expo cookbook. She also points out that big events can accelerate how a region's food is branded, and that Expo 86 coincided with Nanaimo revitalising its downtown and holding its own recipe contest.

After Expo 86, Newman wrote, the bar spread rapidly as a Canadian treat. By the time of her study it could be found at Starbucks in the Christmas season, sold in sheets at Costco, and bought on BC Ferries. In 2019, Canada Post put the Nanaimo bar on its Sweet Canada stamp booklet, alongside blueberry grunt, tarte au sucre, butter tarts and Saskatoon berry pie.

The official Nanaimo bar recipe

In the mid-1980s the city decided to settle the question of what a Nanaimo bar should be. Mayor Graeme Roberts held a contest, in conjunction with Harbour Park Mall, to find the definitive recipe. According to the City of Nanaimo, as cited by the Times Colonist, the four-week contest in 1986 attracted almost 100 entries; Tourism Nanaimo dates the contest to 1985. Either way, Joyce Hardcastle's recipe won, and it is still published as Nanaimo's "official" Nanaimo bar recipe. The recipe has stayed in circulation for decades since: Newman noted in 2014 that it was still given on the town's website, and Tourism Nanaimo's current posting of it, under Hardcastle's name and titled The Ultimate Nanaimo Bar Recipe, dates from July 2017.

Compared with the 1953 Edith Adams version, the ingredients are almost the same. Hardcastle's changes, the Times Colonist notes, were unsalted, European-style cultured butter in place of salted butter, and chopped almonds in place of walnuts, because she was allergic to walnuts.

Making the Nanaimo bar recipe at home

The recipe is short, and its instructions carry the important details. The egg is stirred in the double boiler until the mixture cooks and thickens, before the crumbs, coconut and almonds go in, and the base is pressed firmly into the pan. The middle layer is beaten until light before it is spread.

The chocolate is the step most people rush. The recipe asks for it to cool until it is still liquid but no longer hot before it is poured over the middle layer, and the whole pan then goes into the refrigerator to set.

Variations are part of the bar's history too. The Times Colonist's own version uses walnuts instead of almonds, and Tourism Nanaimo's Nanaimo Bar Trail sends visitors to businesses selling what it calls creative interpretations of the bar.

Why Nanaimo bars still matter to Nanaimo

The bar has become something larger than a dessert in its home town, and nationally too: Newman cites a 2006 National Post survey in which Canadians voted it the nation's favourite confection. Much of Nanaimo bars history since then is about what the city has done with that fame. The Dictionary of Canadianisms describes the term as "enregistered": a phrase that has become a stereotypical identifier for the city itself. Newman, writing in 2014, noted that Nanaimo had begun to embrace the bar as a tourist draw, and the Nanaimo Bar Trail is one result.

There is a certain irony in that, which Newman pointed out. Canadian cuisine is usually described in terms of regions, seasons and native ingredients, and the Nanaimo bar is "none of these things": it relies on brand-name ingredients rather than anything grown or made on the island. Its connection to the city is a name, a cookbook and a story, not a local ingredient.

The Nanaimo Bar Trail

Newman's study ends where many visitors begin. By 2014, she wrote, Nanaimo had put together a suggested tasting trail featuring more than twenty variations on the classic bar: a cheesecake version, a Nanaimo bar martini, an ice-cream version, gluten-free and raw-food versions, and a deep-fried one. Island Farms sold a popular Nanaimo bar ice cream throughout the region.

She was frank about the drawback. One probably should not eat more than one Nanaimo bar at a time, she noted, which makes a tasting trail a test of endurance. Still, a city without a crop or a product to call its own had found its "food of locality", one linked to the place not by ingredients but by association.

What the record still cannot say

For all the research, one question remains open. The 1952 hospital auxiliary cookbook shows the bar existed in Nanaimo before its name appeared in print, and the 1947 Vancouver Sun recipe shows where its base probably came from. What no source yet shows is who, in Nanaimo in the late 1940s, first spread custard icing between a chocolate crumb base and a chocolate top, and whether she ever knew what the square would become.

Questions

What is a Nanaimo bar?

A no-bake dessert square in three layers: a crumb base made with graham crumbs, cocoa, coconut and nuts; a middle layer of custard-flavoured butter icing; and a top layer of chocolate. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles describes it as a crumb base, a layer of buttercream and melted chocolate icing.

Were Nanaimo bars invented in Nanaimo?

Most likely, but the evidence is not complete. Food researcher Lenore Newman concluded in 2014 that the bar was probably developed by a member or members of the Nanaimo Hospital Auxiliary, whose 1952 cookbook contains the first known recipe.

What was the first Nanaimo bar recipe called?

In the 1952 Women's Auxiliary to the Nanaimo Hospital cookbook the recipe was called a 'chocolate square', according to the Times Colonist and Newman's research. The name came later.

When was the name 'Nanaimo bar' first printed?

The earliest confirmed printed use of the name is from 1953. On April 11, 1953, a recipe in the Vancouver Sun's Edith Adams column noted that the bars were also called Nanaimo bars, and the 14th edition of the Edith Adams cookbook, also published in 1953, used the name.

Who was Edith Adams?

Not a real person. Edith Adams was a name created by the Vancouver Sun in 1924 for its homemaking and recipe column, written by generations of staff, much as Betty Crocker was a brand rather than a cook.

What other names have Nanaimo bars had?

Similar no-bake squares went by names such as chocolate slice, New York slice, Mabel's squares, prayer bars and London fog bar, the Times Colonist notes. The 1953 Vancouver Sun recipe appeared as a London fog bar, with Nanaimo bar given as another name.

Did Nanaimo bars come from Alberta?

Cookbook author Jean Paré claimed they were originally Alberta 'smog bars', but Newman reported that an extensive search of Alberta cookbooks of the period found no reference to smog bars or fog bars.

What is the official Nanaimo bar recipe?

The recipe by Joyce Hardcastle, which won a contest held by Nanaimo Mayor Graeme Roberts and is published by Tourism Nanaimo as the city's 'official' Nanaimo bar recipe. Sources date the contest to 1985 or 1986.

How is the official recipe different from older versions?

According to the Times Colonist, the ingredients are almost the same as the 1953 Edith Adams version, but Hardcastle used unsalted, European-style cultured butter instead of salted butter, and chopped almonds instead of walnuts because she was allergic to walnuts.

What gives the middle layer its flavour and colour?

Custard powder. The middle layer is butter, a little cream, custard powder and icing sugar beaten together. Newman considered the custard frosting to be the bar's real innovation.

Do you bake Nanaimo bars?

No oven is needed for the layers themselves. The base is warmed in a double boiler until the egg thickens it, then pressed into a pan; the middle is beaten together; and the chocolate top is melted, cooled slightly and poured over before chilling.

What size pan does the official recipe use?

An ungreased 8-inch by 8-inch pan, according to the recipe published by Tourism Nanaimo.

Who made Nanaimo bars famous outside B.C.?

The Times Colonist, citing the Canadian Encyclopedia, credits Vancouver's Susan Mendelson, who sold the bars in the 1970s, founded The Lazy Gourmet in 1979 and included a recipe in the official cookbook of Expo 86.

Have Nanaimo bars appeared on a stamp?

Yes. They were one of the desserts on Canada Post's Sweet Canada stamp booklet, released in 2019, according to the Times Colonist.

Where can I find Nanaimo bars in Nanaimo?

Tourism Nanaimo promotes a Nanaimo Bar Trail, a self-guided route to businesses in the city and region that sell the bar and variations on it.

Is there an earlier church cookbook recipe?

A transcription published in 1999 points to a recipe in a cookbook from the Women's Association of Brechin United Church in Nanaimo, credited to Joy Willgress. That book is undated and was thought to be from about 1955, later than the 1952 hospital auxiliary cookbook.

Sources

1. Notes from the Nanaimo bar trail, Lenore Newman, Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation 1 (1), 10–19, 2014-05
2. Nanaimo bar, Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-3), University of British Columbia
3. Eric Akis: Nanaimo's signature dessert gets stamp of approval, Times Colonist, 2019-09-25
4. Original Nanaimo Bar Recipe, Tourism Nanaimo, 2017-07-18