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MINCEMEAT (another way) (Take one pound of tender beef)
Take one pound of tender beef, either baked or boiled, and chop it very fine. Chop, also one pound of fresh suet, one pound of apples, one pound of raisins (Valencias, stoned), one pound of currants, two ounces of candied lemon-peel, two ounces of orange-peel, a little of the rind of a fresh lemon chopped fine, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, a dessert-spoonful of salt, and half an ounce of sweet spice. Mix the whole well together, and it will be ready for use.
A meat mincemeat of the older sort, with beef and suet carrying equal weight to the fruit. It mixes in ten minutes; the decisions worth making are about ingredients and storage.
- No spirits means no keepingMany Victorian mincemeats include brandy and a heavier sugar load; this one has neither, and the beef is already cooked. Treat it as a fresh preparation: refrigerate and use within three or four days, or pack it into bags and freeze for up to three months.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest to today's light brown sugar. A quarter pound is about half a cup packed, which is modest by modern mincemeat standards; the apples and dried fruit supply most of the sweetness.
- Sweet spiceHalf an ounce (roughly 5 to 6 teaspoons) of a ready-mixed sweet or pudding spice, sold in Britain as mixed spice. Typical blends are built on cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves, with a little mace or coriander.
- Currants and ValenciasCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Valencia raisins were sold with the seeds in, hence "stoned"; ordinary seedless raisins need no preparation.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher, chopped or grated cold, is what the recipe assumes. Packaged shredded suet works directly; vegetarian shredded suet is a straight substitution but shifts the flavour away from the beef.
- The beefLeftover roast or boiled beef, trimmed of gristle and chopped very fine rather than minced to paste. A little of the cooking liquid or a spoonful of the pan juices keeps it from drying out in the mix.
- Yield and useRather over five pounds of mincemeat, enough for roughly four dozen small pies.
- Let it sitMix, cover and give it a day in the refrigerator before baking. The salt and spice need time to move into the apple and suet; used at once it tastes of separate ingredients.
Mincemeat began as a genuine meat dish. Medieval and early modern English cooks preserved chopped mutton, beef or tongue in a sweet, heavily spiced mixture of dried fruit and suet, the sugar and spices doing preservative as well as flavouring work, and "shred pies" or "minced pies" of that kind were standard Christmas fare well before the fruit-only version existed. By the time Cassell's was compiling its dictionary in the later nineteenth century the fruit-only version was well established, and meat versions were printed alongside it as an older alternative; this one appears under the heading "another way". The pound-of-everything structure is characteristic of the period's household writing, easy to remember and easy to scale, and the equal weights of beef, suet, apple, raisins and currants belong to the earlier tradition. Meat had largely vanished from commercial mincemeat by the mid-twentieth century, leaving the suet as the last trace of the animal.