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Mince Pie
1 quart fat beef (cooked well and chopped fine) 2 quarts green apples (chopped fine) 2½ cups raisins (seeded and chopped) 1½ cups currants 2½ teaspoons mixed spices ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg 3 cups brown sugar 4 tablespoons vinegar 1 cup hot water 3 tablespoons Five Roses flour (stirred in).
Fill crust and bake in moderate oven.
Bake brown. Mince pies should be made with puff paste and 2 crusts. These pies will keep for several days. Should be reheated before serving.
A true mincemeat — actual beef, not just suet — mixed raw with fruit and baked straight into the shell. The proportions are given in volume, so weigh once and note it down.
- What the quart of beef meansA quart of finely chopped cooked beef is roughly 1½ lb. "Fat beef" is deliberate: a lean cut gives a dry, grainy filling. Braised or boiled brisket, chuck or shin, cooked until tender and cooled before chopping, is the right thing.
- Green applesNot a variety name — it means hard, tart, underripe cooking apples. Granny Smith or Bramley work. Two quarts chopped is about 2½ lb whole apples, or six to eight medium.
- Mixed spicesThe period blend is cinnamon, cloves, allspice and mace, sometimes with ginger. Buy a mixed spice or make your own; the separately listed nutmeg is on top of it.
- Moderate ovenAround 350 to 375F. The instruction to "bake brown" matters more than the clock — figure 45 minutes to an hour for a full two-crust pie, since the filling goes in raw and the apples need time to collapse.
- Puff paste with two crustsA bottom crust of puff pastry under a wet filling will go soft. Blind-bake it, or use short pastry below and puff on top.
- The flourThree tablespoons stirred into the whole batch is a light thickener only. It sets the juice released by the apples; it will not rescue a filling made with watery dessert apples.
- KeepingThere is no brandy and no sugar-cure preservation here beyond the brown sugar and vinegar, and the pie contains cooked meat. "Will keep for several days" assumed a cold pantry in December. Refrigerate, and reheat to hot through rather than merely warm.
- YieldThe batch makes enough filling for four or five 9-inch two-crust pies. It can be made a day ahead and chilled; the flavour improves.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, which is why the instructions assume knowledge the reader already had and why "Five Roses flour" appears in the ingredient list rather than plain flour. This mince pie is the older, meatier kind: mincemeat began as a medieval way of extending and preserving cooked meat with dried fruit, sugar and spice, and the beef survived in North American home recipes long after English commercial mincemeat had shrunk to suet, fruit and spirits. The vinegar and brown sugar here do the work that brandy does in the British version — sharpening the fruit and helping the filling keep — a detail that likely reflects both temperance sentiment and the ordinary economy of a farm kitchen in the years around the First World War.