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Mince Pie Filling
3 lbs. lean beef finely chopped 2 lbs. suet finely chopped 3 qts. apples finely chopped. 3 lbs. raisins seeded and chopped 2 lbs. currants 3 lbs. citron cut in small pieces ½ cup candied orange peel chopped ½ cup candied lemon peel chopped ½ cup lemon juice 1 cup orange juice 2 tablespoons salt 4 cups sugar 1 cup coffee 2 cups cider 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon allspice 2 teaspoons cinnamon 3 cups brandy 1 cup sherry 1 cup currant jelly Mix all ingredients except brandy and sherry, and cook two hours; add liquor; let stand in crock for a week before using.
This is a full-scale nineteenth-century household batch: roughly two gallons of mincemeat, enough for a dozen or more double-crust pies. Scale it to a quarter unless you intend to give jars away.
- Cut it down3 lb beef, 2 lb suet, 3 lb raisins and 3 lb citron together with the fruit and liquid make an enormous quantity, on the order of three gallons before it cooks down. A quarter batch still fills three or four 9-inch pies.
- Apples by volumeApples are measured chopped, not weighed: 3 quarts of finely chopped apple is about 3 lb of fruit as purchased, six to eight large ones. A firm tart variety holds its shape through two hours of cooking.
- The beefLean beef means a cheap muscular cut — chuck, shin or round. Many period mincemeat recipes boil the beef tender before chopping; the recipe as printed does not say, and cooking it through before it goes in the pot is the safer reading, since two hours in a thick sweet mixture may not tenderise it.
- Suet and citronSuet is the hard fat from around the kidneys and loins of beef, sold shredded by butchers and online; grated frozen unsalted butter is a common substitute and gives a softer set. Citron here is candied citron peel, not the whole fruit, and 3 lb of it is assertive; it can be cut back if you want the fruit less dominant.
- Currants are driedThe 2 lb of currants are dried Zante currants, effectively small raisins, not fresh redcurrants. The cup of currant jelly at the end is the fresh-fruit preserve, adding sweetness and tartness.
- Coffee and ciderA cup of coffee means brewed liquid coffee, strong and unsweetened. Cider is unspecified and could be sweet or hard; sweet apple cider is the safer reading, and hard cider works and pushes the flavour drier.
- Cooking it without scorchingTwo hours in the heaviest pot you own, over the lowest workable heat, stirred often. Sugar, jelly and fruit sugars catch on the bottom quickly and a scorched batch cannot be rescued.
- Storage, not a crock on the shelfThe liquor goes in off the heat so the alcohol survives, and the week's rest lets the spices marry. Because this contains cooked meat and fat, keep it covered in the refrigerator for that week rather than at room temperature, and freeze what you will not use within a month. This mixture is not safe for water-bath canning.
- BakingThe recipe covers the filling only and gives no oven instruction. As a modern default, fill a double-crust shell generously — mincemeat barely shrinks — and bake hot at first, around 425F for 15 minutes, then about 350F for 30 to 35 minutes until the crust is set and coloured.
Mincemeat began as a genuine meat dish: medieval and early modern English cooks packed chopped beef or mutton with dried fruit, spice, sugar and spirits, and the pies were a fixture of the Christmas table long before they became sweet. American cooks kept the beef and suet well into the twentieth century, mixing large batches in autumn when apples and cider were cheap. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate maker, but it aimed to be a complete household manual, so a family-scale mincemeat sits among the desserts as a matter of course. The meat dropped out gradually over the following decades, until "mincemeat" came to mean fruit and suet alone, and then fruit alone.