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Mincemeat
Mix well together half a pound of raisins, stoned and chopped small; half a pound of currants, washed; half a pound of chopped beef-suet; ten or a dozen apples, peeled, cored, and chopped; a quarter of a pound of lean beef, without skin or fat, boiled and chopped; one nutmeg, grated, and a tea-spoonful of allspice; a quarter or half a pound of candied peel, according to the richness desired, chopped. Put the ingredients into an earthen jar with a close-fitting cover, and pour a glass of brandy over them. Stir up these ingredients from time to time. Mincemeat is best made a fortnight or three weeks before it is wanted.
This is a nineteenth-century meat mincemeat, and the problem with it is not the flavour but the keeping. Read the points below before deciding what to do with it.
- No sugar at allMincemeat recipes normally rely on a high sugar concentration, working with the suet and the spirit, to bind water and make the mixture inhospitable to microbes. This formula contains none — no sugar, no treacle, no honey — which removes a principal preservative from a mixture that is expected to sit for three weeks.
- Cooked beef held at room temperatureA quarter pound of boiled lean beef, chopped and buried in a covered earthen jar of moist fruit, is cooked meat held for a fortnight or more at temperatures where spoilage organisms and food-poisoning bacteria can grow. The jar is stirred and reopened repeatedly, which reintroduces contamination each time.
- The brandy does nothing hereA single glass of spirit poured over four or five pounds of fruit, suet and meat gives a very low alcohol level once it has distributed itself through all that water-rich apple. That is far below the concentration needed to inhibit anything.
- The apples are the wettest partTen or a dozen chopped raw apples contribute a great deal of free water and their own sugars. In a properly sugared mincemeat that water is bound up; here it simply sits in the jar as a growth medium, and fermentation or mould is the likely outcome long before three weeks are up.
- Later baking is not a rescueMincemeat is baked in pies, but oven heat kills organisms without destroying the toxins some of them leave behind. A mixture that has spoiled in the jar is not made sound by being enclosed in pastry.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current recipe with measured sugar and defined storage, or a modern suet-and-fruit mincemeat with no meat in it at all. This page is worth reading as a record of how the dish was once put together, not as working instructions.
- Reading the originalSuet is the hard fat from around beef kidneys, sold shredded in the UK and available from butchers elsewhere. Candied peel means citron, orange and lemon peel boiled in syrup, sold in whole caps in this period rather than as diced mixed peel. A glass of brandy in Victorian usage is a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz.
Mincemeat began as exactly what the name says: minced meat, spiced and mixed with dried fruit, a medieval English way of stretching and flavouring beef or mutton that descends from the same tradition as the spiced meat pies of the late Middle Ages. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat steadily lost ground to the suet and the fruit, and Victorian cookery books can be found offering both versions — one with beef or ox tongue, one without. The Christmas association is old and well attested, though the frequently repeated tale that Puritans banned mince pies outright is a later embellishment of a real hostility to Christmas feasting. What is unusual about this particular entry is the absence of sugar; sugar was the preservative that let a household keep a jar of mincemeat maturing on a cold larder shelf from November to Twelfth Night.