Home › Village Receipts › Mince Meat (Four pounds of lean meat)
Mince Meat (Four pounds of lean meat)
Four pounds of lean meat chopped fine, ten pounds apples, one and a half pounds suet also chopped fine, four pounds raisins, two pounds currants, four pounds sugar, two pints cider, three pints molasses, one quart of liquor the meat was boiled in, one-half pound citron, three teaspoons ground cloves, ten of cinnamon, three of mace, one tablespoon pepper and six tablespoons salt, two nutmegs, juice and rind of three lemons and two of oranges.
— Mrs. Charles Trowbridge
This is a barrel-sized ingredient list with no method attached, which is how experienced cooks wrote down mincemeat: everyone in the household already knew what to do with it. The quantities scale down cleanly by quarter or eighth.
- YieldAs written the ingredients total well over thirty pounds before cooking, enough to fill a dozen or more nine-inch pies. A quarter batch is the sensible size for one kitchen.
- The missing methodBoil the meat until tender, reserve the cooking liquid, chop it fine, then combine everything and simmer gently for one to two hours until the apples break down and the mixture is thick and dark. Stir often; the sugar and molasses scorch readily on a thin-bottomed pan.
- The meatMost likely lean beef; a cut such as neck, shin or chuck suits the method, though period mincemeat was also made with venison or tongue. Simmer it plain and unsalted, since the quart of "liquor the meat was boiled in" is the cooking broth and carries whatever seasoning you put in the pot.
- SuetBeef kidney suet, chopped or grated fine, not rendered. Butchers will still supply it on request; frozen suet grates far more easily than fresh.
- Currants and citron"Currants" are dried Zante currants, not fresh berries. Citron is the candied peel of the citron fruit, sold in tubs at holiday time; candied orange or lemon peel substitutes tolerably.
- CiderAmbiguous in recipes of this period. Sweet cider gives a milder, sweeter mincemeat; hard cider gives the acidity and keeping quality the original cooks probably relied on. Either works, but say which you are using when you write the recipe down.
- SeasoningTen teaspoons of cinnamon and six tablespoons of salt look alarming until you remember the batch weight. Scale the spices with everything else, then taste at the end of the simmer; freshly bought ground spice may well be stronger than a jar that had been standing in the pantry.
- StorageRefrigerate for a couple of weeks or freeze in pie-sized portions. Do not put a meat mincemeat through a boiling-water bath; it is a low-acid preserve, and jarring it safely requires a current tested pressure-canning process rather than a nineteenth-century crock in a cold cellar.
Mincemeat began as a genuine meat dish, a medieval way of preserving chopped flesh in sugar, dried fruit, spice and fat, and in some American kitchens it stayed that way long after English mince pies had begun shedding their beef. A recipe like this one belonged to the late-autumn work of the farm year, when the apples were in and a household might lay down enough mincemeat to carry it through the Thanksgiving and Christmas pies and well into the winter. The proportions tell you what the kitchen had in quantity, ten pounds of apples to four of meat, and what it had to buy in small precious amounts, the citron, the nutmegs, the two oranges. Commercially jarred mincemeat, mostly fruit with suet and no meat at all, took over in the twentieth century, which is why the word now surprises people who read a receipt like Mrs. Trowbridge's.