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Mince Meat for Tarts or Sweet Sandwiches
Two pounds of chopped seeded raisins, one pound of currants, two pounds of chopped apples, two and a half pounds of sugar, half a pound of citron sliced very thin and cut into small pieces, two ounces of cinnamon, two grated nutmegs, three lemons sliced and cut into small pieces. Brandy flavoring and cloves to taste. Mix well and put into glass jars. Keep a week before using. If you wish to use this in pies, the addition of one pound of suet (which melts when heated), makes a richer mixture.
An uncooked, sugar-packed fruit mixture that ripens in the jar. It works as a sandwich spread as written, and becomes pie filling with the suet added.
- Scale and yieldThe fruit, sugar and citron together run to about eight pounds, enough filling for several nine-inch pies. Halving or quartering the recipe changes nothing about how it behaves.
- Two ounces of cinnamonThat is close to half a cup of ground cinnamon, a quantity that will dominate everything. Modern palates are better served by two to three tablespoons, tasted and adjusted after a day in the jar.
- Brandy flavoringIf the book is American and of 1930 it was written under Prohibition, which would explain a call for bottled extract rather than spirits. Actual brandy, a quarter cup or so, does the job better, and the alcohol helps the keeping quality.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday time and increasingly hard to find. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly; skip it rather than replace it with fresh fruit, which adds water.
- The lemonsSliced and chopped means peel, pith and all, and the pith carries real bitterness. Removing the seeds and slicing very thin, as the recipe does with the citron, keeps the texture from turning into rind chunks.
- Storage, honestlyThis is a sugar preserve, not a canned product: there is no heat processing here and no reliable seal. Keep the jars refrigerated and use within a few weeks. The suet version in particular should be held cold, or better, mixed in at the time you make the pie.
- The week's restNot optional if you want the flavour the recipe is aiming at. The sugar draws juice from the apples and raisins, the spices bloom in the syrup, and a mixture that tastes raw and sharp on day one tastes like mincemeat on day seven.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, available from a butcher and best grated from frozen. Frozen grated butter or vegetable shortening gives a similar richness in the baked pie, though not the same clean melt.
Mincemeat began as exactly what its name says: minced meat, preserved with dried fruit, sugar and spice, though the often-repeated claim that the sugar and spice served as much for preservation as for flavour is folk explanation rather than documented practice. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat receded until only the suet remained as a token, and here even the suet is parenthetical, added only if the mixture is destined for a pie rather than a slice of bread. The "brandy flavoring" is the other period marker: this was writing for kitchens under the Volstead Act, and extract stood in for the spirits that older recipes assumed. The instruction to keep it a week may echo the preserve's original logic, when a crock of mincemeat was laid down in autumn and drawn on all winter.