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Mock Mince Pie
One-half peck of green tomatoes, one dozen apples, two pounds of light brown sugar, one pint of vinegar, one quart of water, one tablespoon of salt, one tablespoon of ground cinnamon, one-half teaspoon of cloves. Boil ten minutes and can. When making pies add the raisins.
— Mrs. Frank Tice
BOSTON APPLE PIE (FILLING).
Cut up enough apples to make three cups, stew them with one and one-half cups of sugar, and one-half cup of water, piece of cinnamon bark about two inches long; cook until apples are tender; remove bark and squeeze through a colander. Add one cup of hot cream, one tablespoon of lemon juice, yolk of three eggs and whites of one; add one tablespoon of melted butter. Bake. Make meringue of whites and brown slightly.
Two receipts run together here: a green tomato "mincemeat" put up in jars, and a Boston apple pie filling. The first cannot be followed as printed, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Why the canning failsThe instruction is "boil ten minutes and can" — no jar size, no headspace, no processing method, no processing time, no temperature. Ten minutes of boiling in the kettle sterilizes nothing once the mixture is ladled into jars and sealed; that step is the whole of modern preserving practice and it is simply absent.
- Acidity is diluted out of rangeTomatoes sit right at the borderline of the acid/low-acid divide and current practice calls for added acid when canning them at all. Here one pint of vinegar is stretched across roughly four quarts of tomatoes plus a dozen apples plus a full quart of added water. Nothing in the receipt fixes the finished pH, and a sealed, low-acid, room-temperature jar is the exact condition in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin. Boiling does not destroy the spores, and the toxin is odorless and tasteless.
- Do not adapt it by eyeGreen tomato mincemeat can be put up safely, but only to a tested formula with specified acid, jar size and process. Use a current tested recipe rather than trying to patch this one.
- Half a peckA peck is eight dry quarts, so half a peck is roughly four quarts of green tomatoes — about 6 to 7 lb. The dozen apples are unspecified as to variety or size, which is one more reason the proportions here cannot be trusted to land in a safe range.
- "When making pies add the raisins"The raisins are left out of the jars and stirred into the filling at pie time. The spice, vinegar and brown sugar supply the dark, sweet-sour character of true mincemeat, and the raisins supply the look of it.
- The Boston apple pie fillingThis second receipt is a baked custard thickened with three egg yolks and one white, enriched with a cup of hot cream, and finished with a meringue of the two remaining whites. It is a separate dish and has nothing to do with the tomato mincemeat above it.
- Cinnamon barkA two-inch piece of stick cinnamon, simmered with the apples and lifted out before the fruit goes through the colander. Ground cinnamon is not a substitute — it would cloud and grit the strained purée.
- No oven given"Bake" is the whole of the direction, with neither temperature nor time, and a cream-and-yolk custard is unforgiving about both. Follow the oven instructions in a current custard-pie recipe.
Mock mince pies belong to a long American habit of imitating an expensive dish with what the garden already had. True mincemeat wanted suet, beef, dried fruit and spirits; mock versions leaned on apples, crackers, raisins, vinegar and spice to reproduce the dark, sweet-sour, heavily spiced character without the meat or the liquor — a saving that suited both thin household budgets and temperance sentiment. Green tomatoes were a common base by the later nineteenth century because every kitchen garden ended the season with fruit that would never ripen, and the vinegar-and-brown-sugar treatment turned that surplus into shelf stock for winter pies. The receipt is signed with a contributor's name, as community cookbook receipts generally were: these were transcriptions of what a cook already knew by hand, which is why the canning step is left as a single word and the oven temperature is left off altogether.