Home › Bread-Making › Pies with Cider
Pies with Cider
Three pounds of good beef, lean and fat together; nine quarts of green apples quartered; three pounds of good raisins; nine cups of good hard cider, or five cups of good vinegar and four cups of water; six pounds of sugar, or twelve cups pressed full and rounded; one and one-half cups suet cut fine, or the same of butter; one and a half ounces of cinnamon and three-fourths ounce of cloves ground together. Put all into a kettle and simmer until well heated through, then pack into a jar for use.
This is a mincemeat — a barrel-scale batch of it — and the problem is the last sentence rather than any of the ingredients. As written the beef is never cooked through and the finished mixture is stored in an unsealed jar, so this belongs on the page as a historical document only.
- The beef never reaches a safe temperatureNo cooking time or temperature is given -- "simmer until well heated through" is not a verifiable instruction for three pounds of beef in a kettle of this size, and the recipe does not state whether the beef was cooked beforehand, as many mincemeat recipes of the period assumed. If the mass is only warmed rather than brought properly to temperature, the interior of the meat can sit for a long stretch in the range where Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7 and Clostridium perfringens multiply, and nothing later in the recipe corrects it.
- Packing into a jar is not canningThere is no sterilised jar, no seal, no processing time and no temperature. A low-acid meat mixture packed warm into a jar and kept at room temperature is the kind of environment in which Clostridium botulinum can grow if air is excluded, and it produces toxin without any smell or visible spoilage.
- The acid is not measurableNine cups of hard cider or five of vinegar cut with four of water gives a pH that depends entirely on the strength of the cider or vinegar used, which is unknowable then and now. Meat mixtures can only be safely canned under pressure at a verified temperature, and acidity in an untested proportion does not substitute for it.
- Sugar and alcohol do not preserve thisSix pounds of sugar across some three gallons of fruit and meat is nowhere near a preserving concentration, and whatever alcohol the hard cider contributed is largely driven off by simmering. The keeping quality this recipe relies on is a cold pantry, not the ingredients.
- ScaleNine quarts of quartered apples plus twelve cups of sugar, three pounds each of beef and raisins and nine cups of cider comes to something on the order of thirty pounds of finished mincemeat, a quantity clearly meant to be kept and drawn on rather than used at once.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current tested recipe with a specified process. Meatless mincemeats and freezer or refrigerator versions are widely published and are what modern practice recommends.
Mincemeat with actual meat in it is the older form; the sweet, meatless jarred filling most people know now is the survivor of a long retreat. Chopped beef, suet, dried fruit and warm spices in a pastry case run back through English cookery for centuries, and the combination made sense in a kitchen where sugar, spice, dried fruit and fat were all preserving agents as much as flavourings. The green apples and hard cider suggest a farmhouse recipe timed to the autumn -- windfall apples too tart to eat and cider from the same press, converted into one keeping mixture to be spooned out for pies through the winter. The alternative of "five cups of good vinegar and four cups of water" gives households without cider, or unwilling to keep any, a way to make the same mixture.