Mincemeat
Two quarts boiled beef, two quarts suet, chopped fine (or a part butter, for suet). Six quarts apples, one quart molasses (best quality). Four pounds sugar, three pounds raisins, one pound citron. Nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and wine to your taste. Mix well, pack in jars, with melted butter on top, if to keep long. Put in a cool place.--Mrs. J. W. Mincemeat.
Three pounds meat (after it is boiled). Four pounds suet, three and one-half pounds raisins, one and one-half pounds currants, one-half pound dried cherries, two nutmegs, and mace to your taste. Four pints white wine, one pint brandy, four pounds brown sugar.--Mrs. M. E. J. B.
Mincemeat.
Six cupfuls beef, twelve cupfuls apples, three cupfuls sugar, two cupfuls molasses, two cupfuls butter, two pounds raisins, one quart cider, three tablespoonfuls cinnamon, two tablespoonfuls allspice, two nutmegs. Mincemeat.
Two pounds lean fresh beef, boiled and chopped. Two pounds beef suet chopped fine, four pounds pippin apples, two pounds raisins stoned and chopped, two pounds currants, one-half pound citron, two grated nutmegs, one ounce powdered cinnamon, one-half ounce each of cloves and mace, two large oranges, one teaspoonful salt, one quart brandy, one quart wine, one wineglass rose water.
Four separate contributors' formulas run together here, and the difference between them matters: the last two are essentially brandy-and-wine preserves, while the first and third rely on nothing stronger than cider, molasses and a cool cellar. None of them can be safely put up by modern standards.
- Cooked meat under butter is potting, not canningBoiled beef and suet packed into jars, sealed with a butter cap and held in a "cool place" is an anaerobic, low-acid meat pack held at cellar temperature. That combination is the textbook setting for Clostridium botulinum, which produces no smell, no gas and no visible spoilage in a fat-sealed jar. Butter is a barrier to air, not to bacteria.
- No temperature, no time, no sealThere is no processing step of any kind here: no boiling-water bath, no pressure processing, no stated holding temperature and no keeping period beyond "if to keep long." Meat preserves require measured pressure-canning times that these recipes cannot be reverse-engineered into.
- The alcohol is not a reliable preservative at these ratiosMrs. M. E. J. B.'s version carries four pints of wine and a pint of brandy to roughly seven pounds of meat and suet, a far higher proportion of spirits than the others. The third recipe uses cider and molasses in place of wine and brandy, and the first leaves the wine unquantified ("to your taste"), so the effective alcohol may drop to near nothing while the same storage method is kept.
- Suet in quantityTwo quarts of chopped suet is beef kidney fat, sold today mainly by butchers and some online suppliers; the "or a part butter" note in the first recipe shows that cooks were already substituting when the book was compiled.
- Units, for reading the textA quart is 4 cups, a pint 2 cups; a wineglass is roughly 2 fluid ounces. "Pippin" was a general term for apples raised from seed, and by this period usually meant a firm, tart keeping apple such as the Newtown Pippin — a Granny Smith or Northern Spy sits in the same place on the scale.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current recipe with tested processing directions, or make it as a refrigerated or frozen batch rather than a shelf preserve. Do not adapt the storage instructions above.
Mincemeat began as a way to make a little meat go a long way in company with dried fruit and spice, and the medieval and early modern English pies that gave it its name did contain mutton or beef alongside the raisins and currants. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1879 meat was gradually disappearing from the mixture in parts of Britain and the northern United States, and the four versions collected here — all built on boiled beef and suet, and all bulked with dried fruit and spice — represent the older meat-based tradition still in working use. Collecting several contributors' formulas under one heading is characteristic of the community cookbooks of the period; none of these entries says how long to keep the mixture or how to tell when it has spoiled.