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Mincemeat
7 pounds currants, 3 1/2 pounds peeled and cored apples, 3 1/2 pounds beef, 3 1/2 pounds suet, 1/2 pound each citron, lemon, and orange peel; 2 1/2 pounds coffee sugar, 2 pounds raisins, 4 nutmegs, 1 ounce cinnamon, 1/2 ounce each cloves and mace, 1 pint brandy, and 1 pint white wine. Wash currants, dry, pick them; stone the raisins; remove skin and sinews from beef and suet. Chop each ingredient, separately, very fine; put into large pan as they are finished, finally adding spices, brandy, and wine; thoroughly mix together; pack in jars; store in cold, dry place.
This is a full household batch of old-style mincemeat — roughly twenty-four pounds of it — and it belongs to a period when raw beef and suet were expected to keep for months in a cold larder under sugar, spice and spirits. The notes below explain the terms and the quantities, and why the method itself is no longer sound.
- Raw beef, never heatedThe instructions call for skin and sinew to be removed and the beef chopped fine, with no cooking at any stage. The meat goes into jars raw and is stored, not processed. Nothing in the procedure brings it to a temperature that would destroy Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7, and nothing sterilises the jars or seals them.
- Preservation is unmeasuredThere is no salt cure, no saltpetre, no vinegar, no boiling-water process and no stated temperature or holding time. The keeping power rests entirely on sugar, dried fruit and the two pints of brandy and wine distributed through some twenty-four pounds of mixture — far too dilute, and far too uncontrolled, to be relied on. A "cold, dry place" in a household of this period meant an unheated larder or cellar in winter, a condition no modern kitchen reproduces.
- Suet in a sealed jarSuet in a jar -- Raw beef fat packed against raw meat in jars, with little air exchange, is the kind of low-acid, low-oxygen environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a concern, though the recipe does not say the jars are sealed. If you want mincemeat, use a current tested recipe — meatless versions are now the norm, and any meat version should follow modern instructions for cooking and refrigeration.
- Coffee sugarNot flavoured sugar. Coffee sugar was a coarse granulated sugar sold for table use; ordinary granulated is a reasonable equivalent.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Seven pounds is the largest single item in the list. "Stone the raisins" reflects a time when seeded raisins such as muscatels were still usual and seedless kinds had not displaced them.
- Whole spicesFour nutmegs is roughly three tablespoons grated. The ounce of cinnamon and half-ounces of cloves and mace are weights, not volumes — an ounce of ground cinnamon is roughly a quarter of a cup, which is proportionate to the bulk of the batch but startling read on its own.
- ScaleThe ingredients total around twenty-four pounds, enough to fill a nine-inch pie perhaps twenty times over. Recipes of this size were written for a household that laid in mincemeat once a year, in late autumn, for the whole winter's baking.