Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes: Place
Place flour in a bowl and rub lard in thoroughly; add salt, sugar, and baking powder. Beat egg well and add sufficient milk to make the whole into a rather stiff paste. Knead lightly, and roll out about a quarter of an inch thick, cut into rounds and wet the edges. Place a little jam in the center of each and fold over.
Pinch the edges together and flatten slightly, put on a greased baking sheet, and bake in a quick oven twenty minutes.
From Mrs. Jesse Knight of Utah.
Mince-Me pound butter, 2½ pounds brown sugar, 3 pounds boiled beef neck 1½ pounds suet, 2½ pounds white sugar, tablespoonfuls cinnamon, tablespoonfuls nutmeg, FAVORITE DISHES IN FAMOUS HOMES 1031 2 tablespoonfuls mace, 2 tablespoonfuls allspice, 2 tablespoonfuls salt, Juice and rind 3 lemons, 6 pounds raisins, seeded, 3 pounds currants, 1 tablespoonful almond extract, 1 pound citron, 8 pounds apples, 1 pint brown sherry, 1 pint brandy.
Rub butter and brown sugar together; chop beef neck after boiling till tender enough to fall from bone; grind or chop finely suet. Add spices to white sugar, grate rind of lemons, being careful not to get any white, and mix grated rind into sugar and spices. Seed raisins, wash and dry currants, chop citron finely, peel and chop apples. Mix all thoroughly together, adding sherry, brandy, and almond extract last. Put in glass jars; it will keep indefinitely.
Two separate preparations sit on this page: small jam turnovers, and a very large batch of meat mincemeat intended for long storage. The caution applies to the mincemeat, which is a raw-packed, unsealed, low-acid meat preserve.
- Why the mincemeat failsBoiled beef neck, suet and apple are mixed cold, packed into glass jars, and expected to "keep indefinitely" at room temperature. Nothing in the process brings the sealed jars to a temperature that destroys Clostridium botulinum spores, and the mixture is low-acid, moist and oxygen-poor once packed — the exact conditions in which those spores germinate and produce toxin.
- The alcohol does not preserve itA pint of sherry and a pint of brandy spread through roughly thirty pounds of meat, suet, fruit and sugar gives a final alcohol concentration far below anything antimicrobial. The same is true of the sugar: it is dispersed through wet fruit and meat rather than concentrated as it would be in a jam.
- Suet at room temperatureRaw beef suet, ground and left unheated in a sealed jar, will also go rancid and can carry surface bacteria from butchering. Historic households relied on cold larders and rapid turnover through the winter, which is not the situation a modern pantry recreates.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current tested recipe. Meatless mincemeats are acidified with fruit and vinegar and processed to a measured schedule; meat versions require a pressure canner. Do not adapt the proportions above and assume the result is shelf-stable.
- The turnovers: no quantities givenThe pastry instructions survive but the ingredient list does not. Flour, lard, salt, sugar, baking powder, an egg and milk describe a rich baking-powder short paste; any standard scone-dough or rich shortcrust proportion will behave as described.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F by the usual modern equivalences. Twenty minutes at that heat suits quarter-inch rounds; watch the last five minutes, as jam that escapes a seam will scorch quickly on a greased sheet.
- Sealing the turnoversWetting the edges before folding is the hinge of the method. Jam boils and expands, so pinch firmly and keep the filling well back from the rim, or the turnovers will burst and weld themselves to the tray.
- LardModern shelf-stable lard is often hydrogenated and behaves differently from the unhydrogenated lard of the period. Unhydrogenated lard, or butter, gives a closer texture.
Mincemeat of this kind — actual beef, suet, dried fruit, citron, spice and spirits, ground together in tens of pounds — is the older form of a preparation that has since shed its meat almost entirely. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century households made it in autumn, when apples and the butchering season coincided, and drew on the crock through the winter for pies; the spices, sugar, citrus peel and liquor were understood as keeping agents as much as flavourings. The scale here is a domestic industry rather than a dish, and the confident closing line, "it will keep indefinitely," reflects a period in which spoilage was judged by smell and appearance alone, decades before botulism was traced to under-processed home preserves. The jam turnovers on the same page belong to the opposite tradition: the quick, baking-powder-raised teatime baking that filled American community and celebrity cookbooks around 1900, where each contribution came signed with the name of the woman who sent it in.