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Summer Mince Pies
One tea-cup chopped raisins, one tea-cup chopped crackers, one tea-cup vinegar, not too sour, two teaspoons cinnamon, salt and pepper to taste, five eggs beaten well, four cups sugar; bake with two crusts.
This is a mock mincemeat — no meat, no apples, no suet — built from pantry staples to imitate the tang and spice of the real thing. The proportions as printed need thought before you commit to them.
- The sugar is the problemFour cups of sugar against one teacup each of raisins and crackers is far out of balance for a single pie, and would be cloyingly sweet. Either the recipe is scaled for three or four pies (the raisins and crackers then being short) or the figure is a printer's error; start with one cup of sugar per pie and taste the filling before it goes into the shell.
- Tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is smaller than a modern mug, though the measure was never standardised; a common working figure is about 3/4 cup, 6 fl oz. Use the same cup throughout so the ratios hold.
- CrackersPlain soda or water crackers, crushed to coarse crumbs, not sweet cookies. They are the body of the pie, standing in for the chopped meat and apple of true mincemeat, and they swell as they absorb the vinegar and egg.
- VinegarCider vinegar is the likely intent, and "not too sour" is the operative instruction — cut it with water by half if yours is sharp.
- Salt and pepperThe black pepper is not a mistake. Mincemeat proper carried the warmth of clove and mace against a meat base, and pepper does part of that work here. A few grinds, no more.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A double-crust pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the bottom crust — around 425F for fifteen minutes — then 350F for another thirty-five to forty, until the filling is set and no longer sloshes when the pan is nudged.
- Assembly and yield"Bake with two crusts" means a standard double-crust pie: line the plate, fill, lid, seal and vent. As written the filling is thin and egg-heavy, so slit the top crust generously or it will lift. The yield is uncertain, for the reasons given above.
- CoolingEgg-set fillings firm considerably as they cool. Give it at least two hours before cutting or the first slice will run.
Mincemeat was a creature of the cold months: it belonged to the autumn slaughter, when suet and scraps of beef or venison were preserved with sugar, dried fruit, spirits and spice, and the pies were eaten through winter. "Summer" mince pies — also called mock mince in American household books of the later 1800s — solved the off-season problem by faking the flavor rather than the substance. Crumbled soda crackers gave the body, raisins the fruit, vinegar the sour ferment of a well-aged crock, and cinnamon and pepper the spice. The type turns up in thrift-minded and rural cookery of the period, where a cook might have eggs, sugar and a barrel of crackers on hand long after the last apples had gone soft and the meat was spent. That it survived into print at all is a fair measure of how much the pie was wanted, and how little the filling mattered next to the idea of it.