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Mince Pie
Ingredients: Four pounds of lean, cold boiled meat chopped fine, nine pounds of apples chopped fine, one and a half pounds of suet chopped fine, three pounds of raisins, two pounds of currants, half a pound of citron sliced fine, five pounds of sugar, three teaspoons of ground cloves, ten teaspoons of ground cinnamon, five teaspoons of ground mace, one teaspoon of ground black pepper, six tablespoons of salt, one quart of cider and vinegar mixed with one quart of molasses. Mix all, and add the juice and grated rind of two lemons; or, instead of cider, vinegar and molasses, one quart of sherry and one pint of brandy may be substituted. Keep this mincemeat in stone jars; add a little more liquor, if it should become too dry, when about to make pies.
This is a mincemeat, not a pie: the recipe makes the filling and assumes you know how to line a plate with pastry. As written it yields roughly twenty-five pounds, enough for a dozen or more nine-inch pies, so scaling to a quarter or a fifth is sensible unless you are feeding a boarding house.
- The storage instruction is the one to ignoreNineteenth-century households kept mincemeat in a stone crock in a cold pantry all winter, relying on sugar, salt, acid and spirit to hold it. Cooked meat in an unsealed jar at room temperature is not a risk worth taking now: refrigerate the finished mincemeat in covered containers and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it in pie-sized portions.
- The meat"Lean, cold boiled meat" would usually have meant beef — shin, neck or brisket simmered until tender, cooled completely, then chopped. Chopping warm meat gives a pasty texture. Some of the cooking liquor can go in if the mixture looks dry.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, as supermarket trimmings are too soft. Chill or freeze it before chopping. Packaged shredded suet works, and vegetable shortening will do at the cost of flavour.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante grapes, not fresh blackcurrants. Citron is the candied peel of a thick-skinned citrus, sold at holiday time and easily replaced by candied orange or lemon peel.
- The salt looks wrong but is notSix tablespoons across some twenty-five pounds of fruit, meat and sugar works out to a normal seasoning level. If you scale the recipe down, scale the salt with it rather than eyeballing.
- ApplesUse a firm tart apple that holds its shape, peeled and cored before chopping. Windfalls and cooking apples would have been an obvious use.
- The two liquid optionsCider, vinegar and molasses give a darker, sharper, more frugal mincemeat; sherry and brandy give the richer version. Do not use both.
- Baking the piesThe original gives no baking instructions and assumes a double-crust pie on a plate. In a modern oven, 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F until the crust has browned and the filling bubbles at the vents, will do; the mincemeat needs no further cooking, only heating through.
- RipeningThe flavour is raw and hot with spice on day one. A week in the cold improves it, with a little more cider or brandy stirred in if it tightens — which is what the recipe's last sentence provides for.
Mince pie began as a genuinely meaty dish — medieval and early modern English cooks chopped mutton or beef with dried fruit, spice and suet, the sugar and spices acting as preservative as much as seasoning. By the time this book was printed the meat was in retreat: American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century increasingly offer meatless "mock mince" made with green tomatoes, crackers or extra apple, and the twentieth century finished the job, so that commercial mincemeat today usually contains suet at most. This version sits in the middle of that long slide. The alternative given between cider-and-molasses and sherry-and-brandy is also telling: the same recipe served the temperance household and the one with a decanter. Mince pie's association with Christmas is old and much repeated in England, where it was said, traditionally rather than verifiably, that eating one on each of the twelve days brought luck.