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Appleless Mince-Meat
Chop fine eight pounds green tomatoes, add six pounds sugar, one ounce each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice, simmer slowly till tomatoes are clear, then put away in a covered jar. For pies in winter, take in the proportion of two-thirds tomatoes and one-third meat, and season with butter, boiled cider, sugar if needed, etc., as regular mince pies would be seasoned.
This is a two-stage recipe: a spiced green-tomato preserve made at the end of the growing season, then drawn on through the winter and combined with meat to fill pies. Read it as a base, not a finished filling.
- Scale and yieldEight pounds of tomatoes with six pounds of sugar makes a very large quantity of preserve; the recipe gives no yield or pie count. Scale it down to a quarter if you only want enough for a couple of pies.
- The tomatoesHard green tomatoes, picked before frost, are the point of the dish. They hold their shape and carry acidity; a ripe tomato collapses into sauce and turns the mixture flat and sweet.
- Drain them firstGreen tomatoes throw a great deal of watery, sharp juice. The recipe does not say so, but chopping, salting lightly, standing an hour and draining before the sugar goes in will shorten the simmer to "clear."
- "Till tomatoes are clear"This is the hinge. The pieces should go translucent and the syrup thicken to a heavy, jammy consistency; uncovered, over low heat, stirring often as it thickens. Expect two to three hours. Undercooked, it weeps into the crust.
- Spice quantityAn ounce each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice is roughly three to four tablespoons of each ground spice; heavy by modern taste but in keeping with mincemeat, which was meant to be strongly spiced. Ground spice from a jar older than a year will give you dust and no flavour.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced to a dark syrup; reduce a quart of unfiltered apple cider to a scant cup. It is sold again by some New England producers. Vinegar is not a substitute.
- The meatNineteenth-century mince pie commonly used boiled, cooled and finely chopped beef, often neck, shin or chuck, plus chopped suet; the recipe here says only "meat." A pound of braised beef, chopped fine, with two ounces of suet or butter, fits the stated two-thirds tomato to one-third meat.
- StorageA "covered jar" in an unheated pantry is not shelf-stable storage by any current standard, and this mixture has no measured acid. Refrigerate it and use within a few weeks, or freeze in pie-sized portions.
- Baking the pieThe recipe gives no baking direction. In modern practice a double-crust pie of this filling takes a hot start, around 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 30 to 35 minutes until the crust colours. The filling is already cooked; you are only setting the pastry.
Mincemeat began as a genuine preserved meat dish chopped beef or tongue, suet, dried fruit, spirits and spice, the sugar and alcohol doing the preserving and thinned toward the sweet, largely fruit filling we know now over the course of the nineteenth century. Apples were, by most accounts, the bulk ingredient in American versions, which is exactly what makes this one worth its title: Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributed household receipts, and an apple crop could fail, or a family could simply run short before winter was out. Green tomatoes, on the other hand, were free in quantity every autumn, since frost was coming for the whole vine anyway. Spiced green-tomato preserves and "mock mince" turn up in late-century American community cookbooks for the same reason, and the substitution works because the sugar, the cloves and the boiled cider are doing most of the flavouring the fruit is largely there for body.