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Dartmouth Pie
Mince two pounds of mutton, from which all the fat has been cut away, and add to it one pound of finely-shredded beef suet, one pound of well-washed currants, four ounces of sugar, and a little salt and nutmeg. Make a paste by boiling two ounces of butter with four ounces of beef suet, and working it into eight ounces of flour. Cover the mixture with this paste, and bake for an hour and a half. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
This is a meat mincemeat pie of the old kind, sweet and savoury at once, baked under a boiled suet paste. Cassell's gives no oven temperature and no liquid for the pastry, so both need supplying.
- OvenNo temperature is stated. An hour and a half suits a moderate oven, 350F, with the pie covered loosely with foil if the crust colours before the meat is done.
- The paste needs waterAs written, 2 oz butter and 4 oz suet boiled and worked into 8 oz flour will not come together. This looks like a hot-water crust with the water left out: bring the fats to the boil with a little water -- start with about 2 fl oz and add more only if the flour stays dry -- pour into the flour, and work it quickly while hot, then shape before it cools and stiffens.
- That is a thin lidEight ounces of flour makes enough paste to cover a pie dish, not to line one. Treat it as a top crust over a deep dish of three pints or so -- the filling runs to about four pounds -- not as a raised pie case.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Modern packets are clean; the instruction to wash them dates from when they arrived gritty and stalky.
- SuetA pound of shredded suet in the filling plus more in the paste is very heavy by current taste. Half the filling suet gives a mixture that still binds and bastes without setting solid as it cools. Packet shredded suet works; fresh beef suet from a butcher needs the membrane picked out before shredding.
- MuttonRarely sold now. Hogget or a boned shoulder of lamb is the nearest thing; shoulder has the fat and connective tissue that keeps a long-baked mince from drying. Mince coarsely rather than buying fine lamb mince.
- MoistureNothing wet goes into the filling, and ninety minutes in the oven will dry it. A few tablespoons of stock, cider or brandy stirred through before covering is consistent with period practice and keeps the mince from turning to sand.
- SeasoningFour ounces of sugar to two pounds of meat reads sweeter on the page than it tastes. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground nutmeg loses its aroma quickly and will taste noticeably flatter.
- Yield and costSeven or eight portions, as stated. The 4s 6d is late-Victorian retail and has no useful modern equivalent beyond showing this was a substantial family dish rather than a cheap one.
Sweetened meat pies like this are the surviving branch of medieval English mincemeat, in which minced mutton or beef, suet, dried fruit and spice were baked together and the meat only gradually dropped out over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving the suet and currants behind in the Christmas mince pie we still eat. Cassell's places Dartmouth Pie among the regional entries of its alphabetical sweep; the name is generally attached to Devon, mutton country, though the dish is not confined there and the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in a household dictionary of the 1870s to 1890s is a good marker of how late the meat version persisted in provincial kitchens, well after fashionable cookery had decided that sugar and mutton did not belong in the same dish.