Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mincemeat, with Beef
Mincemeat, with Beef
Stone and cut two pounds of raisins (Valencias), wash and dry two pounds of currants, mince one pound of lean beef, free from skin and gristle, chop two pounds of beef suet very fine, add two pounds of moist sugar. Cut into small pieces six ounces of mixed candied peel--orange, citron, and lemon. Pare and core a pound of apples, grate a small nutmeg and the rind of two lemons, squeeze out the juice of one, add a full tea-spoonful of allspice, and a pinch of salt. Mix these ingredients well together, pour over them a large wine-glassful of brandy; press tightly into an earthen jar and exclude the air. Mincemeat is best made a fortnight before it is wanted. When about to use it, take from the bottom of the jar. Probable cost, 6s. for this quantity.
This is the older, genuinely meaty form of mincemeat, and the instruction that makes it unmakeable today is not the ingredient list but the storage: raw minced beef sealed into a jar with air excluded and left at room temperature for a fortnight or longer. The notes below explain the reading of the recipe and where it fails.
- Raw beef held at ambient temperatureA pound of raw lean beef is mixed in and never heated at any point before storage. Two weeks in a covered jar in a Victorian larder is an uncontrolled fermentation; the mixture is relied upon to keep by sugar and spirit alone, with no measured salt, no nitrite, and no temperature specified.
- Air excluded, low acid, no measured cureSealing a moist, low-acid, meat-containing mixture to exclude air is the kind of anaerobic storage that raises a botulism question, and nothing here is measurable as a cure. The very high sugar may or may not inhibit growth, and the apples and lemon juice do not acidify the whole mass reliably. This is home preserving without any of the numbers that would make it verifiable.
- Water activity is guessworkSugar and brandy do preserve by lowering available water, but a pound of pared apples and the juice of a lemon push it back the other way. The original gives no way to know where the finished mixture lands, and "a large wine-glassful" of brandy is nowhere near enough spirit to sterilise anything.
- "Take from the bottom of the jar"The original gives no reason for this direction; the usual reading is that the liquid settles, so the bottom is used first. It also means the jar is repeatedly opened and disturbed over weeks of use, which undoes whatever seal the original intended.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current recipe. Modern versions are almost always meatless, or use cooked meat and are refrigerated or properly processed, with quantities and holding temperatures given.
- Reading the ingredientsValencias are large seeded raisins, hence "stone"; moist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar; beef suet is the hard kidney fat, sold shredded and packeted today. Six shillings for roughly ten pounds of mincemeat marks this as a substantial household batch, not a small one.
Mincemeat began as what its name says: minced meat, spiced and sweetened, in the medieval tradition of preserving flesh with sugar, dried fruit and spice through the winter. Recipes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries routinely call for beef, tongue or mutton alongside the raisins and suet, and the Christmas association is generally traced to that same seasonal slaughtering-and-preserving calendar. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century the meat was already optional in many households, and the dictionary carries meatless versions alongside this one; over the following century the beef dropped out almost entirely, leaving the suet as the last trace of the original. That the book still specifies "with Beef" in the title may be no more than the usual practice of naming a variant by its distinguishing ingredient, though it is tempting to read it as a sign that the plain word mincemeat could by then be assumed to mean the fruit-only kind.