Kate McMillen and her staff spend most of the week baking pies, cakes and cookies at Lauretta Jean’s, the small Southeast Portland bakery she owns that often draws long lines of customers craving sweets and treats day and night.

Yet among the glitzy display cases sits a no-bake, square-shaped delicacy that sparks curiosity among many customers about its unusual name and origin.

“They have a hard time pronouncing it, they have a hard time spelling it,” McMillen laughed. “And everyone is like, ‘What does this mean? What’s Nanaimo bars?’ And so we have to tell people that it’s a place in Canada and they’re known for this bar.”

This slice of Canadian history — composed of a chocolatey, nutty wafer bottom layer, a creamy custard filling and a chocolate ganache topping — takes its name from Nanaimo, a coastal city of about 100,000 people on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. The treat reportedly helped entice Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to move from the U.K. to Canada in 2020. It also continues to fascinate Canadians and Americans in Portland who seek it out even though the dessert is rarely sold locally today.

Culinary forensics on Nanaimo bars

In contrast, roughly one in three bakeries in Canada offers Nanaimo bars, said food historian Lenore Newman of the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The dessert is also widely available in coffee shops, supermarkets and on BC Ferries.

With family ties to Nanaimo, Newman said making Nanaimo bars is a Christmas tradition in her family. She has even explored the city’s famous Nanaimo Bar Trail, sampling not only the sweet squares but also Nanaimo bar-inspired cheesecakes, ice creams and martinis.

In a research paper published a decade ago, Newman argued that the earliest known Nanaimo bar recipes appeared in a 1952 community cookbook published by the Women’s Auxiliary to Nanaimo Hospital. Among them, a recipe titled “Chocolate Slice,” submitted by Mrs. E. MacDougall, most closely resembled the modern version. A year later, the Vancouver Sun published a prize-winning recipe for a dessert called “London Smog Bars,” noting that it was also known as a Nanaimo bar.

Newman said the ingredients themselves help establish the timeline of the dessert’s origin.

“It is a classic what we call ‘populux recipe,’” she said. “It requires a pound of butter, a large amount of sugar, commercial chocolate, commercial Bird’s custard powder — and it has to be Bird’s to make it work — and also, of course, baker’s chocolate. These recipes that brought together all these premade ingredients that were very expensive are only found in postwar North America.”

Newman added that while many desserts from the 1950s and ’60s disappeared, Nanaimo bars survived in part because of Vancouver caterer Susan Mendelson, who prominently featured them in a cookbook she wrote for the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, or Expo 86, in Vancouver. The event attracted many American visitors and helped introduce the Canadian dessert south of the border.

“It was one of the first times Vancouver really appeared on the world map, and people were exposed to Canadian cuisine for the first time,” she said. “It might have been the first time a lot of people experienced the Nanaimo bars, and probably some people, when they got home [they] were like, ‘Oh, I wonder how I make these things.’”

Gluten-free bars sprinkled with sea salt

Nanaimo bars spread not only to Portland and other West Coast cities but also to inland communities such as Missoula, Montana, where McMillen first encountered them while working at a bakery during college. Although she had traveled to several Canadian cities, she had never visited Nanaimo and only learned it was a city in British Columbia after her father traveled there and told her about it.

“My father loves boats and he went to Nanaimo and was like telling me that he went there. And I was like, ‘Hold on a tick.’ I was like ‘I’ve made a Nanaimo bar.’ So I dove in and did all the little research and was like ‘Oh, this is [a bar] named after a place.”

On a weekday around noon in late May, McMillen demonstrated the process in Lauretta Jean’s kitchen, where fruit for pies filled the counters and the smell of vanilla drifted from baking crusts. Using a metal ruler and a hot knife, she carefully cut 20 identical rectangular Nanaimo bars from a chilled pan. Growing up in a family of bakers, she joked that cutting the bars feels almost like performing surgery because of the precision involved.

In 1986, the City of Nanaimo adopted local resident Joyce Hardcastle’s submission as the official Nanaimo bar recipe after holding a four-week contest in which nearly 100 variations of the confection were judged.

McMillen said Lauretta Jean’s version is nearly identical to the official recipe, except that it uses a house-made gluten-free graham cracker made from oats and rice flour for the bottom layer. The bakery also uses almonds, as the official recipe does, but toasts them beforehand because they pair naturally with the coconut and chocolate in the base.

She acknowledged that the middle custard filling is the defining element of the dessert. Instead of traditional Bird’s custard powder, however, the bakery uses vanilla pudding mix, which creates the smooth, frosting-like consistency it prefers.

McMillen does have one signature touch.

“We do sprinkle Maldon salt on the top because, you know, a little salty sweet there, like coconut [and] almonds, a match made in heaven.”

A favorite among musicians

Rachel Rencher, who owns and operates Blue Sky Baking from her home in Southwest Portland, said her Nanaimo bar recipe also stays close to the official version, although she often leaves out coconut and nuts when making bars for large groups because of allergy concerns. Unlike McMillen, she always uses Bird’s custard powder, which gives the filling its characteristic yellow hue.

A full-time flute and piccolo player, Rencher has traveled to Vancouver Island but not Nanaimo itself. She first encountered Nanaimo bars while growing up in eastern Washington during the 1970s, when her older sister made a similar dessert called “London Smog Bars” using a recipe obtained from a woman at a local church. She began making the bars herself after trying one at a coffee shop in recent years and realizing it tasted exactly like the treat she remembered from childhood.

Since then, Rencher has brought Nanaimo bars to rehearsals and concerts, where they quickly became a favorite among fellow musicians.

“I sent them to a rehearsal with my husband and he sometimes will report back if people react, and he said there was this one violinist that saw them and nearly burst into tears. She’s like, ‘I needed this today. I love these so much.’ And so that made my day.

“It can evoke strong reactions if the person is tired enough and they just want some sugar,” Rencher laughed.

Rencher said many customers seek out Nanaimo bars from her because they cannot find them elsewhere. Because the custard filling is overwhelmingly sweet, she prefers a somewhat thicker base while keeping the filling layer more moderate.

‘Recipes don’t need passports’

Although countless Nanaimo bar recipes exist around the world, the ideal ratio of the dessert’s three layers remains a point of contention, especially among Canadians. The debate was evident in criticism of a Nanaimo bar featured on a Canada Post stamp in 2019 and again when The New York Times Cooking published a recipe in 2021.

Steve Walker-Duncan, a culinary arts professor at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia, said the base and filling should be nearly equal in thickness, while the ganache topping should remain very thin.

Rencher said she looked at the New York Times photos and agreed that the unusually thick bases simply looked wrong. Still, she emphasized that everyone should feel free to adapt the recipe however they like.

“Recipes don’t need passports, they don’t have to pass through immigration,” she said. “Everyone gets to enjoy it. Everyone gets to share it and debate the ratio of the layers.”

Back across the Willamette River, McMillen reflected on how Nanaimo bars might even help sweeten the strained relationship between the United States and Canada.

“Canada is like our sister or our sibling, and I really want the U.S. and Canada to get along. Canada is so great, it’s beautiful, they’re bringing us delicious treats,” she said. “I really hope that we can get back to that super great relationship where we both love each other so much.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/07/01/portland-canada-nanaimo-bars-dessert-food/