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Rich Mince Pie
2 pounds lean beef boiled tender (minced fine when cold) 4 pounds apples (chopped fine) 2 pounds suet 2 pounds layer raisins 2 pounds sultanas 2 pounds currants ½ pound citron peel (shredded) ¼ pound orange peel ¼ pound lemon peel ¼ pound walnuts ¼ pound almonds Put above over the fire with 3 pounds brown sugar made to a good syrup with a little water. While heating, add: 1 tablespoon cloves (ground) 1 tablespoon allspice (ground) 1 tablespoon salt 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 tablespoon mace 1 nutmeg (grated) Juice and rind of 2 lemons Boil 15 minutes. Take from fire and, when cold, add 1 quart apple cider. Pack in a stone crock and pour over top 3/4 pint of brandy. When properly sealed will keep for months, and grow more mellow with age.
This is a barrel-scale Edwardian mincemeat: roughly twenty pounds of fruit, suet and boiled beef, packed into a crock and left to mellow. The storage instruction is the part that no longer stands.
- Why the storage failsCooked beef and suet are packed into an unsterilised stone crock, sealed, and held at cellar temperature for months. Nothing here is processed to a temperature or held at an acidity that reliably controls Clostridium botulinum in a low-oxygen, low-acid, meat-containing mass. Modern practice treats meat mincemeat as a pressure-canned or frozen product for exactly this reason.
- The brandy is not a preservativeThree-quarters of a pint of spirit poured over twenty pounds of mincemeat works out to under two percent alcohol through the mass if it dispersed evenly, and much of it stays at or near the surface. It discourages surface mould; it should not be relied on to sterilise the interior.
- The cider works against itA quart of cider added after cooking introduces liquid and sugar into an already-cooled batch with no further heating. That raises the water activity of the mixture at the worst possible moment, which is the opposite of what a shelf-stable preserve needs.
- "Properly sealed" meant nothing measurableA crock of this period was sealed with a plate, a cloth, a paper cover or a layer of melted suet. None of these produce a hermetic seal, and none involve a recorded processing temperature or time. Follow a current tested recipe if you want mincemeat that keeps.
- Scale, if you were only reading for thatThe batch runs to about twenty pounds, enough to fill roughly eight to ten nine-inch pies. Mincemeat of this kind was generally made in bulk, once in the season, for the winter's baking.
- TermsSuet is raw beef kidney fat, still sold by butchers. Layer raisins are large muscat raisins sold pressed in layers; sultanas are golden raisins; currants here are the small dried Zante grape, not fresh berries. Citron peel is candied peel from the citron fruit, not lemon.
Mincemeat began as an actual meat pie: medieval and early modern English cooks combined chopped beef or mutton with dried fruit, spices and suet, the sugar and spice both flavouring the meat and, by a tradition often repeated though hard to demonstrate, helping it keep through winter. By the time this book appeared the meat was already retreating -- many Victorian and Edwardian recipes offer a "lean beef" version alongside a meatless one, and the beef is generally said to have receded from much North American mincemeat over the following few decades, leaving the apples, raisins, suet and spice that people now recognise. The presence of citron, orange and lemon peel, sultanas, currants and imported spices in this quantity is worth noting: it marks mincemeat as a deliberate luxury, made in bulk at the start of the cold season for Christmas and the months after. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour, and its recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, which is why a page like this reads as a household's annual working formula rather than a tested single pie.