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Mince Meat (C brown sugar C vinegar C)
2 C brown sugar 1/2 C vinegar 2 C green tomatoes (chopped) 4 Capples, chopped 1. C raisins (chopped) 1 C suet (chopped) 1/2 t salt, cinnamon, cloves and allspice Add two cups water or fruit juice and boil all together. Mrs. L. J. Ames.
A green tomato mincemeat of the kind that got the last of the unripened crop out of the garden before frost. The abbreviations are the sparest kind of church-supper shorthand.
- Decoding the measuresC is cup, t is teaspoon. "4 Capples" is a typesetting run-together for 4 cups apples, chopped — roughly 4 to 5 medium apples, peeled and cored.
- The spice line"1/2 t salt, cinnamon, cloves and allspice" most likely means half a teaspoon of each rather than half a teaspoon shared among the four, though the shorthand does not settle it. Cloves at that level are assertive.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, not trimmings. Ask a butcher, or substitute an equal volume of cold unsalted butter, cut small, accepting that the texture will be softer and less waxy when cold.
- Green tomatoesFully unripe, hard, pale-green fruit — not tomatillos and not half-ripe pink ones, which are too sweet and too watery. Core them and chop fine; there is no need to peel.
- How long to boilNo time is given. Simmer uncovered, stirring often as it thickens, until the mixture is dark, glossy and jam-like and a spoon drawn through the bottom leaves a track — about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Underboiled mincemeat weeps in a pie.
- Sugar and acidTwo cups of brown sugar against half a cup of vinegar reads sweet, but the tomatoes contribute almost no sweetness and the mixture concentrates as the water cooks off. Taste at the end and add vinegar by the spoonful if it is cloying.
- Yield and keepingAbout 2 quarts, enough for two or three 9-inch pies. The recipe gives no processing instructions, so treat it as a refrigerator preserve: cool, jar, and keep chilled for two or three weeks, or freeze in pie-sized portions. Do not assume a boiling-water canning time from the text.
- Using itMincemeat improves after a few days as the spices settle. Fill an unbaked double-crust shell and bake at 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F until the crust is set and browned.
Mincemeat began as a genuinely meaty preserve — chopped meat, suet, dried fruit, vinegar and spice, the acid and sugar doing the keeping — and by the late nineteenth century in American home cooking the meat had thinned out to suet alone, or vanished entirely, while the name stuck. Green tomato versions belong squarely to that drift: they solved two problems at once, using up fruit that would never ripen and stretching apples and raisins into pie filling for the winter.