Home › Village Receipts › Green Tomato Mince Meat
Green Tomato Mince Meat
One peck green tomatoes chopped fine, two pounds of raisins, two lemons (skin grated and pulp sliced), two oranges (skin grated and pulp sliced); cook together two hours, then add three tablespoons of cinnamon, one tablespoon of nutmeg, one tablespoon of cloves, four pounds of brown sugar, a piece of butter the size of an egg, and boil two hours more.
— Mrs. Charles Deer
A peck of tomatoes makes a great deal of mincemeat, and the recipe assumes a heavy preserving kettle and a cook willing to stand over it. The essentials are the volume and the scorching.
- A peck of green tomatoesA dry peck is 8 quarts, roughly 12-13 lb of tomatoes. Chopped fine means about the size of a pea, either by hand or in short pulses in a food processor; do not purée them or the finished mincemeat turns to sauce.
- YieldProbably somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 pints after four hours of cooking, enough to fill several deep-dish pies with plenty left over. The recipe halves or quarters, but a smaller batch reduces faster, so judge the two stages by thickness rather than by the clock.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It goes in with the sugar and spices at the start of the second two hours; a little fat in a boiling preserve helps keep it from foaming over.
- Scorching is the hingeOnce the four pounds of sugar are in, the mixture thickens fast and catches on the bottom of the pan within minutes if left alone. Use the heaviest wide pot you own, keep it at a lazy simmer rather than a rolling boil, and stir down to the bottom every few minutes for the whole second stage.
- No added liquidGreen tomatoes are watery enough to make their own; the first two hours are essentially a reduction. If the pan looks dry in the first ten minutes, lower the heat rather than adding water.
- The spicesThree tablespoons of cinnamon and a tablespoon each of nutmeg and cloves is heavy by modern taste, but it is spread across roughly ten pints. Ground spice loses potency in the jar, so buy fresh if yours has been open a year.
- CitrusGrate the zest before you slice the fruit, and slice the pulp thin, discarding seeds. Two lemons and two oranges are the only real acid here beyond the tomatoes themselves.
- StorageThe original gives no canning directions and none should be improvised. Refrigerate what you will use within a couple of weeks and freeze the rest in pint containers; if you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested mincemeat recipe and its stated processing method.
- Using itMeatless mincemeat like this is used exactly as the suet kind: as pie filling, in turnovers, or spooned over a steamed pudding. It improves after a week or two in the cold.
Green tomato mincemeat is a frost recipe. Tomatoes that would not ripen before the first hard freeze were stripped from the vines and had to become something, and the mincemeat pot — long-cooking, heavily spiced — absorbed almost anything. Mincemeat proper is generally traced to a spiced mixture of chopped meat, suet, dried fruit and spirits, and the name kept its hold long after the meat was optional; by the late nineteenth century American community cookbooks often carried a meatless version alongside the traditional one, the spices and citrus peel doing the work that meat and suet once did. That this appears under "Village Receipts" with a contributor's name attached is typical of the form — a compiled local cookbook is a record of what one town's kitchens actually made, and green tomatoes in quantity every October is as reliable a fact of local gardening as anything in the book.