Home › Pastry › Mince-Meat (Take five or six pounds)
Mince-Meat (Take five or six pounds)
Take five or six pounds scraggy beef-a neck piece will do-and put to boil in water enough to cover it; take off the scum that rises when it reaches the boiling point, add hot water from time to time until it is tender, then remove the lid from the pot, salt, let boil till almost dry, turning the meat over occasionally in the liquor, take from the fire, and let stand over night to get thoroughly cold; pick bones, gristle, or stringy bits from the meat, chop very fine, mincing at the same time three pounds of nice beef suet; seed and cut four pounds raisins, wash and dry four pounds currants, slice thin a pound of citron, chop fine four quarts good-cooking tart apples; put into a large pan together, add two ounces cinnamon, one of cloves, one of ginger, four nutmegs, the juice and grated rinds of two lemons, one table-spoon salt, one tea-spoon pepper, and two pounds sugar. Put in a porcelain kettle one quart boiled cider, or, better still, one quart currant or grape juice (canned when grapes are turning from green to purple), one quart nice molasses or syrup, and, if you have any syrup left from sweet pickles, add some of that, also a good lump of butter; let it come to boiling point, and pour over the ingredients in the pan after having first mixed them well, then mix again thoroughly. Pack in jars and put in a cool place, and, when cold, pour molasses over the top an eighth of an inch in thickness, and cover tightly. This will keep two months. For baking, take some out of a jar, if not moist enough add a little hot water, and strew a few whole raisins over each pie. Instead of boiled beef, a beef's-heart or roast meat may be used; and a good proportion for a few pies is one-third chopped meat and two-thirds apples, with a little suet, raisins, spices, butter, and salt.
The above is a good formula to use, but, of course, may be varied to suit different tastes or the material at hand. If too rich, add more chopped apples; in lieu of cider, vinegar and water in equal proportions may be used; good preserves, marmalades, spiced pickles, currant or grape jelly, canned fruit, dried cherries, etc., may take the place of raisins, currants and citrons. Wine or brandy is considered by many a great improvement, but if " it causeth thy brother to offend" do not use it. Lemon and vanilla extracts are often used, also preserved lemon or orange peel. The १
This is a nineteenth-century keeping recipe: cooked beef, suet and fruit packed into open jars, sealed under a film of molasses and held in a cellar for two months. The mixture as written is not safely storable by current standards, and the notes below explain the specific failure points along with the terms a reader will meet in the text.
- Why it cannot be stored as directedLow-acid cooked meat and suet held at cellar temperature for two months, under a molasses cap that excludes air, is precisely the environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. There is no measured acid, no sterilisation step and no processing temperature anywhere in the method. A current tested recipe with defined acidity and pressure-canning schedules should be used instead.
- The molasses seal is not a sealAn eighth-inch layer of molasses over the top was meant to keep air off the fruit and slow surface mould. It does nothing to sterilise the contents and, by limiting oxygen at the surface, favours exactly the anaerobic organisms that matter here. Wax and grease caps of this kind are no longer recommended for preserves.
- "A cool place" was a different placeThe original assumes an unheated cellar or a north pantry running well below room temperature through the winter. A modern kitchen cupboard is considerably warmer, which compresses any margin of safety the old method had.
- Wine or brandy is not a preservative hereThe suggested spirits, and the boiled cider or vinegar-and-water, are flavour and mild acidification only. The spirits are offered with no quantity at all, and although a quart of cider or juice is specified, nothing in the method establishes a pH for the whole mass that would make it shelf-stable.
- ScaleFive or six pounds of beef, three of suet, four each of raisins and currants, a pound of citron, four quarts of apples and two pounds of sugar, plus two quarts of liquid, comes to something over twenty-five pounds of mincemeat. The recipe itself claims only two months' keeping for a batch of that size, which is why the keeping question is unavoidable.
- Terms in the textScraggy beef is lean, sinewy stewing meat from the neck. Citron is the candied peel of the citron fruit, not the melon sometimes sold under that name. Currants here are the small dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants.
Mincemeat began as a genuine meat dish: medieval and early modern English cooks combined chopped flesh with sugar, dried fruit and imported spice, the sweetness serving as flavour and, in part, as a keeping measure — though how far the spicing was ever a preservation strategy is disputed. By the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in 1877, the beef was already receding — the book's own closing remarks suggest a third meat to two-thirds apples, and allow beef heart or leftover roast in its place — and over the following generations American mincemeat, the commercial kind especially, increasingly dropped the meat while keeping the suet. The long list of permitted substitutions is characteristic of the book: currants, citron and raisins were bought goods, while grape juice canned at the turning point of the fruit, sweet-pickle syrup and dried cherries were closer to what a farm kitchen had on hand. The aside about wine and brandy echoes Paul on causing a brother to offend, and sits with the temperance current running through Midwestern domestic writing of the period.