Mince Pies
Five bowls chopped apples, three bowls chopped meat, one bowl chopped suet, five bowls boiled cider, one-half bowl molasses, two bowls sugar, three large spoons cinnamon, one teaspoon mace, one teaspoon cloves, one teaspoon pepper, two teaspoons salt, one pound currants, one bowl brandy or wine, juice of five lemons, and the rind of three, one coffee-cup made coffee, good and strong. The bowls referred to are pints.
This is mincemeat filling, not a pie recipe: the pastry, the cooking of the mixture and the baking are all assumed. Read the last line first, because everything depends on it.
- The bowl is a pintTwo cups per bowl, so five bowls of apples is 10 cups. The bowl measures alone come to about 17.5 pints, so the raw mixture is something like 8-9 quarts before it is cooked down; even allowing for reduction that is enough filling for the better part of a dozen nine-inch double-crust pies. Halving or quartering it is sensible unless you are feeding a household through the winter.
- Chopped meat means cooked beefNineteenth-century mincemeat generally used lean boiled beef, simmered until tender and then chopped fine by hand or run through a food chopper; a cheap braising cut such as neck or shin suits it. Venison turns up in some recipes where it was available. Reckon on about 3 lb of cooked meat for three pints chopped, and chop it after cooking, not before.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced by boiling until thick and dark, sold in New England as boiled cider or cider syrup; the degree of reduction varied a good deal, and modern commercial boiled cider is much more concentrated than a lightly reduced home batch. Five bowls is ten cups, which is a great deal of liquid; the mixture is meant to simmer down. Plain apple cider will not give the same concentrated tartness, so a modern concentrate is best let down with water to taste.
- SuetRaw beef kidney fat, grated or chopped fine. Ask a butcher, or substitute an equal weight of very cold unsalted butter, which behaves differently but keeps the filling from tasting lean.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Rinse and pick them over; older stock is often dusty.
- The mixture must be cooked downThe recipe gives no method, and with this much cider the mixture plainly needs reducing: combine everything except the brandy and simmer gently, stirring often, until thick and glossy and no free liquid remains -- an hour and a half to two hours. Add the spirits off the heat so they are not driven off. Sugar and fruit scorch readily on a modern flat burner, so use a heavy pot and low heat.
- Pepper and coffee are not mistakesA teaspoon of black pepper and a cup of strong coffee both belong; they darken the filling and give it a slight bitterness that keeps the sugar in check. Brewed coffee, not grounds.
- BakingFill a double-crust pie generously, vent the top, and bake at 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 30 to 40 minutes until the crust is browned. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking pastry only.
- StorageDo not keep this at room temperature in a crock the way the period did. Refrigerate for up to two weeks or freeze in pint portions; the brandy and sugar help but are not a guarantee with meat in the mixture.
Mincemeat began as a way of keeping meat: minced beef or mutton packed with dried fruit, sugar, spices and spirits, a technique running back to the medieval spiced meat pies of England and still recognisable in the seventeenth-century "minced pye." Over time the meat worked its way out of the recipe, and American mincemeat came increasingly to be fruit and suet alone, with beef surviving in older family formulas like this one. The boiled cider suggests apple country, where cider was reduced to syrup every autumn and used as a sweetener and preservative. Measuring by the bowl, with a note at the end explaining that the bowl is a pint, is a domestic habit of measurement.