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Mince Pasties
Make puff paste; spread it with mince made of boiled tongue, suet, apples, raisins, orange juice, cider, sugar, citron, currants, and preserved peach. Cover with pastry cut into stars, and bake a delicate brown.
This is a sketch rather than a formula: the book assumes you already keep mincemeat on hand and know how to handle puff paste. The proportions are yours to set, so treat the list as a template.
- No quantities givenThe original supplies an ingredient list and nothing more. A workable ratio for this style of mincemeat is roughly equal volumes of chopped cooked tongue and chopped apple, half that volume of raisins and currants together, and about a quarter as much suet, with citron, preserved peach, sugar, cider and orange juice added to taste.
- Boiled tongueBeef tongue must be simmered until tender (2-3 hours for a fresh one), then peeled while warm and chopped fine or ground. Ready-cooked tongue from a deli counter works. The meat is a texture and richness component here, not a flavour you will taste distinctly against the fruit and spice.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers on request and shredded before use. Packaged shredded suet is sold in some markets. Chilled unsalted butter, grated, is a common modern substitute and gives a softer filling.
- Citron and preserved peachCitron here means candied citron peel, found with baking supplies at holidays. Preserved peach means peaches put up in heavy syrup; drain them well and chop, or the filling will run out of the pastry.
- CiderThe recipe does not say which kind. Sweet (unfermented) apple cider and hard cider were both in ordinary use, and either will work here; use only a few tablespoons, as the filling should be moist rather than wet.
- Oven temperaturePuff paste needs a hot oven to lift: 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F until the pastry is set and evenly golden, about 15 minutes more. "A delicate brown" means light gold, not deep brown, so watch the last five minutes.
- AssemblyOnly the tongue is cooked; the apples and suet go in raw, so the bake has to do some work on the filling as well as the pastry. Keep the mince cold and the paste cold, leave a clear border for sealing, and chill the assembled pasties 20 minutes before they go in the oven.
- The star top"Cover with pastry cut into stars" may mean separate stars laid over the filling or a lid cut with star shapes; the recipe does not say. Brush the pastry with beaten egg or milk for colour.
- YieldA pound of puff paste and about a pound and a half of mince will make roughly a dozen small pasties. They keep two or three days refrigerated and reheat well at 350F.
Mincemeat began as meat: medieval and early modern English "minced pies" combined chopped mutton, beef or tongue with dried fruit, spice and suet, the sugar and fruit acting as much as preservatives as sweeteners. Neat's tongue appears regularly in English and American receipts into the nineteenth century, chopping down fine enough to disappear into the fruit. Household books of the 1890s and 1900s print both versions side by side, the older meat mincemeat and the newer "mock" mince made of apples, raisins and crackers, and by the middle of the twentieth century most commercial jars were meatless, leaving only the suet as evidence of the original. The word pasty marks the format: a small hand pie, filling enclosed or half-enclosed in paste, meant to be eaten without a plate.