Mincemeat
Two pounds of unsalted bullock's tongue ; two pounds of ox-kidney fat; two pounds of stoned raisins; three pounds of currants; two pounds of good apples; half a pound of blanched almonds, with a few bitter ones : mince all these separately, then mix them and add to them minced-half a pound of candied citron and orange peel; one ounce of best cinnamon and cloves; the juice and zest of three lemons; half an ounce of salt; half an ounce of allspice; one pound of sifted sugar; half a pint of sherry; half a pint of brandy or pineapple rum; half a pint of orangeflower water. Mix the solids well before the liquids are added. Press all into jars, which are to be close covered and put aside for some days before use.
This is a Victorian meat mincemeat, and two features of it put it outside what a modern kitchen can reproduce: bitter almonds among the nuts, and cooked meat and suet held in covered jars at room temperature with no measured cure. The notes below explain the terms and the hazards rather than offering a working method.
- Bitter almonds"A few bitter ones" means the kernels of the bitter almond, Prunus dulcis var. amara, which contain amygdalin and release hydrogen cyanide when crushed and moistened — exactly what mincing and steeping in liquid does. Their sale as food is restricted in the UK, US and EU for this reason, and there is no safe domestic way to judge a dose.
- Uncured meat in sealed jarsThe tongue and kidney fat are minced and jarred with no salt-and-nitrite cure at measured strength, no heat process, and no refrigeration — "put aside for some days" at Victorian larder temperatures. Whether the sugar, spirit and acid bring the mixture to a water activity low enough to control Clostridium botulinum or Listeria cannot be judged from the recipe, and there is no way to verify it in a domestic kitchen.
- The tongue was assumed cookedThe tongue was probably assumed cooked -- "Unsalted" here most likely means uncorned rather than raw, and a boiled tongue was a common standing item in a kitchen of this kind; the recipe gives no cooking step, which suggests one was taken for granted, though it does not say so. Either way, nothing in the instructions brings the meat to a safe temperature at any point.
- Half a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so each half-pint here is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. The four half-pints amount to roughly a litre of liquid — a very wet mincemeat by modern standards, and part of why it was expected to keep.
- Ox-kidney fatThis is beef suet, the hard fat from around the kidneys, and the older name signals that it was bought in the lump and chopped by hand rather than bought shredded. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, is the modern equivalent.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, but strength and character vary widely between brands, so half a pint of one is not the same flavour as half a pint of another; there is no way to know what strength Kettner's kitchen was using.
- Pineapple rumThe term is usually explained as denoting a high-quality Jamaican pot-still rum, the name said to come from the pineapple aroma of its esters; other period sources describe rum actually steeped with pineapple, and the point is not settled. A well-aged Jamaican rum is the nearest modern approximation on the first reading.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current recipe. Modern versions drop the meat, keep the suet, and rely on refrigeration or a proper hot-fill process for keeping.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877, generally attributed to E. S. Dallas rather than to the restaurateur whose name it bears) records mincemeat at the point when it was still, genuinely, minced meat. The dish descends from the medieval and Tudor practice of baking spiced meat with dried fruit, sugar and spirit — the sweet and the savoury not yet separated, and the spices carrying an association with the East that the Christmas pie kept long after it stopped meaning anything practical. Tongue appears in recipes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it minces to a fine, almost smooth texture with a flavour that disappears into the fruit; lean beef and calf's foot appear in other recipes of the period. The meat drops out over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving suet as the last trace, and by the mid twentieth century even that is optional. The bitter almonds here are doing the job later done by almond essence: supplying the benzaldehyde note that reads as intensely almond-like. The dangers of the kernel were known by Kettner's day, but the doses used in cookery were small and casual, and here they are named without comment.