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Mince Pies
Chop one pound of beef suet very fine; two pounds of apples, pared, cored, and minced; stoned raisins, one pound (minced); and one pound of currants. Add of mixed spice, in powder, half an ounce, one pound of powdered sugar, one tea-spoonful of salt, the juice of half a lemon; cut small three ounces of candied orange-peel, one ounce of citron, and one ounce of lemon; mix all well together with half a pint of brandy. Tie down close in a jar, and keep for use. A larger quantity may be made in these proportions. Make the pies with rich, flaky crusts.
This is a mincemeat for filling, not a pie recipe as such — the pastry is left to the cook. It is already a meatless mincemeat, the suet being the only animal element, and it is built to be matured rather than used the day it is mixed.
- Let it matureThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to tie it down and keep it. Freshly mixed, it tastes of raw apple and neat brandy; after two to four weeks the fruit softens, the spice settles and the flavours marry. A month is not too long.
- Half a pint of brandyCassell's uses imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. It is doing preservative work as well as flavouring, and cutting it back significantly shortens the keeping life.
- Powdered sugarIn this period this means finely ground white sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornflour. Use caster or ordinary granulated.
- Mixed spiceThe British blend — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, coriander, sometimes ginger and mace. Half an ounce is roughly two tablespoons across a batch of this size. Pumpkin pie spice is a reasonable stand-in; it is heavier on ginger.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Citron is the candied peel of the citron fruit, sold at Christmas alongside candied orange and lemon peel; if you cannot find it, more candied orange is the usual substitute.
- SuetShredded beef suet in a packet is the direct equivalent, and vegetarian suet behaves almost identically. Grated frozen butter can be used but gives a softer, greasier filling that does not keep as well.
- ApplesThe wording leaves it open whether the two pounds is weighed as bought or after paring and coring; if you read it as prepared weight, allow roughly 2½ lb whole. A tart cooking apple is what the recipe assumes — a Bramley collapses to a purée, a Granny Smith holds its shape more.
- StorageA cool dark cupboard is the traditional home for the sealed jar, and the sugar and brandy do the preserving. Refrigeration is the cautious modern choice and costs nothing but shelf space. Discard any jar showing mould on the surface.
- Yield and bakingThe stated weights come to roughly 7 lb of mincemeat, enough for five or six dozen small pies. The recipe gives no baking instruction; by modern practice, bake filled pies in a hot oven, 400–425°F, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is set and pale gold.
Mince pies really did once contain minced meat: medieval and early modern versions combined chopped beef, or tongue, with suet, dried fruit, sugar and spice, the sweet and savoury sitting together as a matter of course. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat dwindled and then disappeared, leaving the suet behind as its last trace — which is exactly the stage this recipe records, a fruit mincemeat with no meat in it at all but still built on a pound of beef fat. The candied orange, lemon and citron peel belong to the same tradition: imported and costly, they were associated above all with festive baking, which is part of why mince pies stayed a Christmas dish rather than an everyday one. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a successor to the firm's Dictionary of Cookery of the 1870s and was aimed at middle-class households; the closing note that "a larger quantity may be made in these proportions" suggests a cook laying down jars ahead of the season.