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Mince Meat (C chopped cooked lean beef C)
2 lbs. meat, cooked. 8 pts. apples, chopped. 1/2 lb. suet. 4 1/2 lbs. brown sugar. 1 pt. molasses. 1 1/2 pts. vinegar. 2 pts, water. 1 lb. raisins. 1 lb. currants. Juice 2 lemons. 5 C chopped cooked lean beef 1 C chopped beef suet 10 C chopped apples 3 C sweet cider ½ C vinegar 3 C brown sugar 4 C granulated sugar 2½ C seeded raisins Juice 2 oranges 1. T cinnamon 1 T cloves 1 T allspice 2 nutmegs (grated) 1 T salt Reduce liquor in which the meat was cooked to 3 cups. Add to mixture. Bring to boiling point and let simmer one hour. Seal hot. 1 T nutmeg.
This is a meat mincemeat put up by the open-kettle method, and the preserving instruction at the end is the part that cannot be carried over. The notes below explain the terms and then why the process fails.
- Why "seal hot" fails hereFilling jars with hot food and screwing on the lid relies on the cooling contents to pull a seal, with no processing afterwards. Open-kettle sealing of this kind was common in cookbooks of the period and has been rejected for decades: the jar contents never reach or hold a temperature that destroys bacterial spores, and the seal itself is unreliable.
- The specific hazardBeef, suet and reduced meat broth make this a low-acid mixture despite the cider and half cup of vinegar, and the sugar and fruit do nothing to change that. Low-acid food in a sealed anaerobic jar is the exact condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, which is odourless and tasteless and not destroyed by warming the pie filling.
- No measured processThe recipe gives no jar size, no processing time, no pressure and no acidity target. Meat mincemeat is a pressure-canned product under current tested procedures, and there is no way to infer those numbers from what is written. If you want mincemeat to keep, use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon. The spice quantities are large because the batch is large — the listed ingredients come to something like eight quarts before simmering reduces them.
- "Liquor in which the meat was cooked"The broth from simmering the beef, boiled down to three cups. This is what makes the mixture unambiguously a meat product rather than a fruit conserve.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, still sold by butchers on request but no longer a supermarket item. It sets firm when cold, which is why old mincemeat looks solid in the jar.
- NutmegsTwo whole nutmegs, grated, come to something in the region of four to six teaspoons of ground nutmeg — but whole nutmegs vary a good deal in size, so the original is genuinely approximate.
Mincemeat is traditionally described as a way of keeping meat through winter, with the sugar, dried fruit, spice and cider all contributing to preservation. By the time a book of this kind was compiled, the meat was already on its way out of the mixture in many American kitchens: commercial "mincemeat" in a box or jar was increasingly fruit and suet alone, and modern versions often drop the suet as well.