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MINCEMEAT (another way) (Procure a neat's-tongue)
Procure a neat's-tongue; parboil it; take a pound and a half of it, and chop it very fine; shred finely a pound and a half of good beef suet; stone a pound of raisins; pare and core five apples, and take the thin rind of one lemon; chop up the three last-mentioned ingredients very fine, and mix them in a large enamelled pan. Add a pound of sifted loaf-sugar, two pounds of currants, well cleaned, an ounce of cloves, finely beaten, the juice of three lemons, and a table-spoonful of orange-flower water. Mix all these ingredients thoroughly together, and keep them in a covered pan until required.
A survival of true mincemeat, in which meat is a main ingredient rather than a memory. The Victorian household could hold such a mixture in a cold larder; the storage instruction here is the part that fails today.
- Why it is unsafe as writtenThe tongue is only parboiled — partly cooked, and never brought to a temperature that would make it safe to hold. It is then chopped, mixed with fresh apple and lemon juice, and kept in a covered pan with no cooling specified, no spirit, no cure and no processing of any kind. Mincemeats meant for long keeping generally carried a heavy charge of brandy or sack, a much higher proportion of sugar, and a cold larder; this one has none of those safeguards. Use a current recipe if you want to make meat mincemeat.
- Neat's-tongueA neat is an ox or bullock, so this is beef tongue — still sold by good butchers, usually 3-4 lb whole and salted or fresh. A pound and a half of trimmed, skinned meat is roughly half a large tongue.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a solid cone and broken up as needed, then sifted to remove lumps. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct equivalent by weight.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. "Well cleaned" means picked over for stalks and grit, a real task before commercial cleaning.
- An ounce of clovesRoughly four tablespoons of ground clove for about eight pounds of mixture. Even by Victorian standards this is a forceful hand; period mincemeats were generally more heavily spiced than modern ones.
- SuetBeef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, shredded by hand. Packaged shredded suet is the modern equivalent; the flour dusting it carries is harmless here.
- Orange-flower waterA distillation of bitter-orange blossom, once a standard sweet flavouring in British kitchens and now mostly found in Middle Eastern shops. It is potent and a single tablespoon in this quantity is a background note, not a dominant one.
- YieldThe weights come to something over eight pounds — enough for a great many pies, which is the point. A batch on this scale was clearly meant to be drawn on over a season rather than used at once.
Mincemeat began as a way of keeping meat, and for centuries the name was literal: minced beef, tongue or mutton bound with suet, dried fruit, sugar and spice, the sugar and spice often said to have helped preserve it. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century the meat was already retreating, and this version is offered as "another way", a slightly old-fashioned alternative for cooks who still wanted the older, heavier article. Tongue was one of several meats used, alongside beef, and it is lean, close-grained and chops to an even texture without stringiness. The orange-flower water and the lemon rind point back further still, to the perfumed sweet-savoury cookery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which lingered in mincemeat and in Christmas puddings long after it had left the rest of the English table.