Mince Pie
Make mince meat in this proportion :
One cup of chopped beef Two cups of chopped apples One teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One teaspoon of Larkin Cinnamon One cup of brown sugar One-half cup of raisins One-half cup of currants One cup of cider One-half cup of citron, lemon and orange peel
This is a proportion for mincemeat rather than a full pie: the filling is given, the pastry and baking are assumed. A few things need filling in before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The beef should be cooked firstNineteenth- and early twentieth-century mincemeat used lean boiled or braised beef — often the remains of a boiled joint — chopped fine after cooking. Chopping raw beef into a sweet fruit mixture is not what is meant here, and raw meat will not tenderize in the short bake a pie gets.
- Simmer the mixture before it goes in the crustMincemeat is cooked down as a filling in its own right, gently, until the apples break and the cider has mostly gone. Thirty to forty minutes over low heat is the usual range. A filling put in raw will weep into the pastry.
- "Larkin" ingredientsLarkin Table Salt and Larkin Cinnamon are house-brand goods from the company that published the book. Use any salt and any ground cinnamon; the quantities are ordinary.
- CiderCider here may be sweet unfermented apple cider or hard cider; both were used in mincemeat, and hard cider gives more depth. Either works; boiled cider, if you have it, is closer to the intended concentration.
- The peel"One-half cup of citron, lemon and orange peel" means candied peel, sold then in slabs and chopped at home. A half cup total, mixed, not a half cup of each.
- What is missingThere is no suet and no spice beyond cinnamon, both of which mincemeat recipes of the era commonly carried. If you want the traditional richness, a few tablespoons of suet or butter and a pinch each of clove, nutmeg and mace are consistent with the style.
- Yield and bakingThe listed ingredients come to about five and a half cups before the cider; cooked down it will fill one 9-inch double-crust pie generously. The book gives no oven instruction; for a modern oven, bake at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F for another 25 to 30 until the crust colors.
- KeepingMincemeat made without spirits and without a long boil is not a preserve. Refrigerate it and use within a few days, or freeze it.
Mince pie descends from the medieval European meat-and-fruit pie, in which the sugar, dried fruit and spice are usually said to have served as preservative as much as flavoring; the meat content diminished through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century until many commercial "mincemeats" contained no meat at all. This version still carries a cup of chopped beef to two cups of apples. The branded salt and cinnamon written into the ingredient list mark the book's origin: it was issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap manufacturer that built an enormous mail-order trade selling household goods direct to customers, with premiums and recipe booklets to keep the orders coming. The recipes are genuine, but every one is also an advertisement.