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Good Mincemeat Without Intoxicants
Five pounds of beef boiled until tender (it should be salted when partly done).
Let cool in liquor, remove fat, chop very fine and measure. Use twice as much finely chopped apple, which should be tart, as meat. To the apple and meat then add the liquor in which the meat was boiled; also the fat which has been removed, and one quart of boiled cider.
If there was a scant amount of fat, add also half a cup of butter. Jelly or candied fruit will improve the pies, if wanted richer. Add also three teaspoons of cloves, two of cinnamon, same of mace, and three pounds of seeded raisins.
No definite rule can be given for sugar, as more or less is required, according to acidity of apples. Sweeten to taste with brown sugar. After all the ingredients have been put together, warm, and if found too thick for use, thin with cider or unfermented grape juice. When hot this can be put up as fruit and kept indefinitely.-Mrs E. M. Widdicomb.
A temperance mincemeat of the sort New England households put up by the crock. The cooking is straightforward; the preserving instruction at the end is the problem.
- The canning step is the reason for the cautionMincemeat containing beef and its broth is a low-acid mixture, and "when hot this can be put up as fruit" means hot-packing into jars as though it were peaches. That method cannot reach the temperature needed to destroy Clostridium botulinum spores in a dense meat-and-fat mixture, and the recipe gives no jar size, no processing time and no pressure. Meat mincemeat requires pressure canning to a tested schedule; use a current tested recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- Fat and density make it worseThe reserved beef fat, plus the optional half cup of butter, insulates the interior of a packed jar and slows heat penetration further. Thickness is exactly what this recipe optimises for, and exactly what defeats an open-kettle pack.
- Measure by volume, not weightThe instruction is to chop the beef fine, measure it, and use twice as much chopped apple. That is two parts apple to one part meat by volume, which after chopping is nothing like two to one by weight. Follow the volume reading as written.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced roughly seven to one to a dark, tart syrup. It is not apple cider vinegar and not hard cider. It is still made commercially in New England; boiling down fresh unfiltered cider yourself gives the same thing.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg, close to the nut in character though descriptions of the difference vary. Ground mace loses its perfume within a few months, so an old jar will contribute nothing here.
- Salting the beef partway throughThe recipe salts the meat when it is partly done rather than at the start. Any lean, gelatinous cut works better than a tender one: shin, chuck or brisket, simmered until it shreds.
- ScaleFive pounds of beef, twice that volume of chopped apple, and three pounds of raisins makes a very large batch, on a rough reckoning something in the region of ten to twelve quarts of mincemeat. There is no small version implied anywhere in the text.
- SugarThe refusal to give a figure is honest rather than careless. Brown sugar goes in at the end, by taste, against whatever acidity the apples happen to have.
Mincemeat was for centuries a way of stretching and preserving meat with dried fruit, sugar and spirits, and by the late nineteenth century the meat had largely retreated to suet in British versions while American cooks often kept the beef. What marks this one is the title: temperance sentiment ran strong through American domestic writing of the period, and a mincemeat without brandy, sherry or hard cider was a small point of household principle. Boiled cider and unfermented grape juice do the work the liquor used to do, supplying acid, sweetness and concentration; unfermented grape juice was itself a product of the temperance movement, the pasteurising method for it being generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist, in the 1860s.