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Individual Mince Pies
Roll out Crisco paste 1/8 inch thick, stamp into rounds and line gem pans, place in each 2 teaspoons of mince meat; roll out more pastry rather thicker than first, stamp into rounds size of top of pans, wet edges and cover pies, brush over with beaten egg, sprinkle with sugar, and bake 20 minutes in hot oven.
For mince meat, put into jar 1 pound chopped apples, 1 pound sultana raisins, 1/4 pound chopped figs, 1/2 pound currants, grated rind, strained juice 3 lemons, 1 cup Crisco, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 pound chopped almonds, grated rind, strained juice 3 oranges, 2 grated nutmegs, 1/2 cup sherry, 1 cup brandy, 1 ounce mixed spice, 1/2 pound each chopped candied orange and lemon peel, and 2 cups brown sugar. Mix well and keep in well sealed jar.
A Crisco promotional recipe, so the shortening is doing double duty as pastry fat and as the suet substitute in the mincemeat. Note that the mincemeat quantity vastly exceeds what the pies need.
- Hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'hot oven' in books of this period is usually read as about 400–425F. Twenty minutes suits small covered pies at that heat, but watch them: the tops should be set and lightly coloured before the sugar starts to scorch.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a shallow muffin tin, cups about 2 inches across and an inch deep. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the recipe's 2 teaspoons of filling per pie suits cups of roughly that size, and mini-muffin tins will need proportionately less.
- Crisco pasteThis means a plain shortcrust made with vegetable shortening rather than butter or lard — roughly 2 to 3 parts flour to 1 part Crisco by weight, bound with ice water. Shortening pastry is tender but bland; butter or a half-and-half mix is no betrayal of the method.
- Mixed spiceA British blend, mostly cinnamon, coriander seed, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and clove. One ounce is about 4 tablespoons, which with two whole grated nutmegs (roughly 4 teaspoons) makes a very forward, old-style spicing. Halve it if you want the fruit to read.
- Currants and sultanasCurrants here are dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants. Sultanas are golden raisins. Both benefit from a rinse if they are dusty or hard.
- Seal the edges properlyThe one instruction that decides whether these work: wet the pastry rim and press the lid down firmly, and prick or slit each top. Mincemeat boils, and unsealed or unvented pies burst and weld themselves into the tin.
- YieldThe mincemeat comes to something over 6 pounds — far more than one tray of pies needs, and enough to draw on across a season. Mincemeat was customarily made well ahead and left a couple of weeks for the brandy and sherry to work through the fruit, though the recipe itself says only to keep it in a well-sealed jar.
- StorageSugar, citrus acid and a cup of brandy do most of the preserving, but this is an uncooked, unprocessed mixture packed into a jar. Keep it refrigerated rather than in a cupboard, press the surface level to exclude air, and discard it at any sign of mould or fermentation.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911, and the recipes are built to demonstrate that it could replace both butter and suet. That agenda is unusually visible here: English mince pies were traditionally bound with beef suet, and older versions genuinely contained minced meat he the filfilling was chopped tongue, beef or mutton spiced and sweetened with dried fruit. By the late nineteenth century the meat had largely dropped out of home recipes, leaving fruit, peel, spirits and suet, and Crisco's makers were quick to point out that a shortening-based mincemeat contained no animal fat at all — a point that, in the company's wider advertising, is often said to have been aimed at kosher and vegetarian households as much as at the merely thrifty.