Mince Pies
Line some pattypans with a rich puffpaste, No. 4 or 5. Fill them with mincemeat; roof them over, making a small hole in the centre with a fork, and bake them for half an hour.
Kettner assumes you already have mincemeat in the larder and a puff paste from an earlier page, so the whole of the work here is in the pastry and the oven.
- PattypansThese are small round tart tins with straight or slightly sloping sides, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. A standard 12-hole muffin tin or individual tartlet tins stand in perfectly well.
- "Puffpaste, No. 4 or 5"The numbers refer to Kettner's own numbered paste recipes, not to any grade you can buy. Any all-butter puff pastry, bought or made, is the intended article; rough puff is a reasonable stand-in if you are making it yourself.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Puff paste wants a hot oven, 425F, so the layers lift before the butter melts out; drop to 375F after about 15 minutes if the tops are colouring faster than the bases are setting.
- Half an hourThat is long for pies this size in a modern oven. Expect 20 to 25 minutes total, and judge by the pastry: deep gold on top, dry and crisp underneath. The filling only needs to be hot through.
- The ventThe small hole pricked in the centre is not decoration. Mincemeat is wet with suet, sugar and spirit, and the steam will lift or split the lid if it has nowhere to go.
- MincemeatNineteenth-century mincemeat generally contained beef suet and often lean beef or ox tongue alongside the fruit. A jar of modern vegetarian mincemeat is sweeter and softer; a spoonful of brandy and a little grated lemon zest brings it nearer the original.
- Filling levelFill generously but not proud of the rim, or the sugar will boil over and weld the pies into the tin. Loosen each one with the point of a knife while still warm, then cool a few minutes before turning out.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; a batch of paste and a jar of mincemeat will fill roughly a dozen tins of this size. They are best eaten warm the day they are baked, and reheat well at 325F for five minutes.
Mince pies descend from the spiced meat pies of late medieval and Tudor England, in which minced beef or mutton was combined with dried fruit, sugar and the expensive imported spices that arrived through the same trade as the sugar. The meat gradually retreated over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until only the suet remained, and by the time E. S. Dallas compiled Kettner's Book of the Table in 1877 the pie was firmly a sweet one, though butchers' mincemeat with real beef in it was still sold. The association with Christmas is old and well attested; the frequently repeated story that the shape once represented the manger is traditional rather than documented. Earlier pies had been made in much larger oblong pastry cases, though the shift to small round ones was largely complete before the Victorian period.</p>