Home › Village Receipts › Tomato Mince Meat
Tomato Mince Meat
Five pounds of sugar, seven pounds of chopped green tomatoes, two pounds of raisins, cinnamon and cloves to taste. Cook until right thickness for pie.
— Mrs. Frank Grobe
A frugal meatless mincemeat that depends entirely on the cook's judgment: the only instruction is to cook it down until it will hold in a crust. A few things the receipt assumes you already know.
- Green tomatoesThese are unripe red tomatoes picked before frost, not green-when-ripe varieties like Green Zebra. They are firm and tart, which is the point; ripe tomatoes will collapse into sauce and the mixture will never set.
- Chop and drainChop to roughly raisin size, then salt lightly and drain in a colander for an hour, or scald and drain, discarding the first liquid. Seven pounds of tomatoes carry a great deal of water, and draining will noticeably shorten the simmering.
- SugarFive pounds to seven pounds of fruit is very sweet by modern taste, closer to a preserve than a pie filling. Cutting the sugar to three pounds is reasonable, but it will thicken more slowly and keep less well.
- Spices"To taste" for this volume means about 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon and 2 teaspoons cloves as a starting point. Add half, taste when the syrup has reduced, and correct; cloves grow more assertive as the mixture cooks down.
- AcidMany tomato mincemeat receipts include vinegar or lemon, and this one does not. A half cup of cider vinegar or the juice of two lemons sharpens what is otherwise a flat sweetness, and green tomatoes vary too much in tartness to rely on alone.
- How long, and the hingeExpect 1.5 to 2.5 hours at a bare simmer in a wide heavy pan, stirred often once it thickens. "Right thickness for pie" means a spoon drawn across the bottom leaves a track that fills in slowly, with no free liquid pooling; underdone filling weeps into the crust.
- Yield and useThis makes roughly 4 to 5 quarts, enough for five or six 9-inch pies at about 3 cups each. Halving or quartering the receipt is sensible for a modern household.
- StorageThe receipt gives no canning directions, and none should be improvised for a low-acid tomato mixture. Refrigerate what you will use within two weeks and freeze the rest in pie-sized portions.
Meatless mincemeats multiplied in American community cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and green tomato was among the substitutes for the beef and suet of the English original, as was apple. The logic is seasonal thrift: a first hard frost would take the whole tomato patch, so the unripe fruit came in by the bushel and had to be turned into something that kept. Sugar, raisins and the standard mince spices supply everything the reader expects of the flavor, so the absence of meat goes largely unnoticed in a pie he mince did. Receipts like this one, credited to a single villager and reduced to two sentences, were written for neighbors who already knew what mincemeat should look like in the pan and needed only the proportions.