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Apple Mincemeat
Stew a pound of beef until very tender, mince it as small as possible; add two pounds of apples, one pound of finely-shredded suet, two pounds of currants, half a pound of stoned raisins, and three-quarters of a pound of sugar. The apples, raisins, and suet should all be minced separately. Mix these ingredients well together, with one nutmeg grated, a little mace, the gravy in which the meat was stewed, a whole lemon chopped, one glass of brandy, and two glasses of port wine. Keep it in covered jars. Time to prepare, about an hour. Probable cost, 3s. 6d., without the brandy and wine. Sufficient to make six pounds of mincemeat.
A Victorian mincemeat of the older, genuinely meaty kind, cut with apple to bring the cost down. Almost everything translates directly; the one thing that does not is the storage.
- Storage is the hingeCovered jars in a cool larder worked when houses were cold and the mixture was heavy with sugar, suet and spirit, but a cooked-meat mincemeat is not shelf-stable by modern standards. Refrigerate it in clean sealed jars and use within a couple of weeks, or freeze it in portions.
- The beefUse shin, chuck or skirt — cuts that go tender on long stewing and shred well. Stew it in just enough water to cover; the reduced cooking liquor goes into the mincemeat, so keep it to a few tablespoons rather than a panful of thin broth.
- "Mince as small as possible"A food processor works, but pulse in short bursts and process the meat, suet, apples and raisins separately as directed. Run continuously and you get paste, which loses the texture that makes mincemeat worth eating.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Two pounds is a lot by modern eye; it is correct for a six-pound yield. "Stoned raisins" simply means seeded — any modern raisin is already so.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded. Packaged shredded suet is fine; if using fresh suet from a butcher, chill it hard before chopping or it smears. Vegetable suet substitutes acceptably in flavour if not in richness.
- A "glass" of wineGenuinely imprecise in Victorian usage — anywhere from about 2 to 4 fl oz. Roughly 1/4 cup brandy and 1/2 cup port gives a balanced result; more spirit will help keep it but is not preservation you should rely on.
- The whole lemonChopped means peel, pith and flesh together, which supplies the bitterness that balances all that sugar. Pick out the pips first, and scrub the fruit — unwaxed if you can get it.
- SpicesOne whole grated nutmeg is about 2 to 3 teaspoons, generous but characteristic of the period. "A little mace" is roughly half a teaspoon of ground mace.
- Yield and useSix pounds, which at a rough estimate will fill somewhere around four to five dozen mince pies. Two pounds of apples is about five or six medium tart apples such as Bramley or Granny Smith. The recipe does not say whether they are weighed before or after peeling and coring, so either reading is defensible; weighing them whole will give slightly less bulk in the finished mixture.
Mincemeat began as mincemeat in the literal sense: a spiced preserve of chopped meat, dried fruit and fat, related to the older practice of sweetening and spicing meat and sealing it under fat to keep. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the 1870s the meat was already in retreat in many recipes, and this one -- with apple doing much of the bulking, and the beef reduced to a single pound in six -- shows that shift in progress. The costing, "3s. 6d., without the brandy and wine," reflects the book's habit of quoting a probable cost, here excluding the expensive spirits, for households keeping accounts. By the twentieth century beef had dropped out of most British mincemeat, leaving the suet as a trace of its origin, and now often not even that.