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Green Tomato Mince
Chop very fine 1 peck of green tomatoes. Wash in a colander with a very weak brine to remove all juice. Boil a very little. Add 5 pounds brown sugar, 2 pounds raisins, cloves, cinnamon and allspice to taste, also a little candied peel. -Mrs. A. W. Fraser, Iron Springs, Alta.
A meatless mincemeat built to use up the green tomatoes left on the vines at frost. The proportions are farm-scale and the instructions assume a cook who already knows what mincemeat should look like.
- A peck is a lotA dry peck is 8 quarts, roughly 12 to 13 lb of green tomatoes, which chops down to about 6 quarts of pulp. Scaled to a quarter batch that is about 3 lb tomatoes, 1 1/4 lb brown sugar and 8 oz raisins.
- The brine wash is the pointGreen tomatoes are watery and sharply acidic. Chopping fine, salting lightly and draining in the colander pulls out the thin juice so the mince thickens instead of flooding the pastry. Drain well and press gently; the recipe never says how weak 'very weak' is -- something on the order of a teaspoon of salt to a quart of water is a reasonable reading.
- "Boil a very little" understates itThe first boil reads as a blanch to soften the flesh. The recipe says nothing about what follows the sugar, but comparable green tomato mincemeats simmer the sweetened mixture down, stirring often, until thick, dark and jam-like -- likely the best part of an hour for a batch this size. Watch the bottom once it thickens.
- Spices "to taste"For a quarter batch, start with 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon each cloves and allspice, then adjust once the sugar has dissolved. Ground spice tastes flatter cold than hot, so judge it warm.
- What the recipe omitsMany green tomato mince recipes carry a little vinegar or lemon, plus salt, to keep 5 lb of sugar from reading as pure sweetness. A tablespoon or two of cider vinegar per quart of finished mince and a good pinch of salt bring it into balance.
- Candied peelMixed candied citrus peel, sold for fruitcake. Chop it fine; 2 to 3 oz per quarter batch is enough to register without dominating.
- StorageNo preserving method is given, and none should be improvised. Refrigerate the finished mince for a couple of weeks or freeze it in pint containers. Sealing it in jars requires a current tested tomato-mincemeat process, not this text.
- Yield and useA full batch makes roughly 7 to 8 quarts, enough at about 3 cups a pie to fill ten or so double-crust nine-inch pies; the filling improves after a week's rest.
Green tomato mincemeat belongs to the thrift end of North American pie-making: at the end of a short growing season, the tomatoes that would never ripen were chopped, drained and treated exactly as apples or beef suet mince would be, with sugar, raisins, peel and the warm spices that signal Christmas baking. Versions circulated widely in late nineteenth-century American and Canadian community cookbooks, and by the time the Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes sent in by customers, the idea was familiar enough to need no explanation from Mrs. Fraser of Iron Springs, Alberta. That prairie address is itself telling: an early frost in southern Alberta could take a whole tomato crop green, and the sugar-heavy mince turned a loss into pie filling.