Mince Pie
Use Plain Paste for under crust, fill with mince-meat, cover with Puff Paste.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: Lowney's assumes you have already made the two pastries and the mince-meat found elsewhere in the book. Here is what the shorthand takes for granted.
- Plain Paste and Puff PastePlain paste is an ordinary shortcrust of flour, fat, salt and cold water; puff paste is laminated pastry with butter folded in through repeated turns. Store-bought all-butter puff pastry stands in for the top without complaint, and the difference in texture between a sturdy base and a flaky lid is the whole point of the pairing.
- Mince-meatPeriod mince-meat means chopped apple, raisins, currants, citrus peel, spices, suet and often cooked lean beef or ox tongue, moistened with cider or brandy. Modern jarred mincemeat is usually meatless (suet or vegetable fat) and ready to use, so the pie needs only long enough for the crust. If you use a from-scratch version containing raw meat, the meat must be cooked through before it goes into the shell.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Modern practice for a pie of this kind would be a hot start, around 425F, to set the puff lid and crisp the bottom, dropping to about 350F once the pastry has risen and coloured; reckon roughly 35 to 45 minutes in total for a 9-inch pie.
- Keep the base from going softMince-meat is wet and sugary. Chill the lined pie plate before filling, and if the filling seems loose, drain off some liquid or add a spoonful of fine breadcrumbs to the bottom of the shell. A baking sheet under the plate helps the base cook.
- Sealing and ventingPuff paste needs steam to escape or it lifts away from the filling in a dome. Cut two or three slits in the lid and press the edges together with water, not egg wash, at the rim; egg on the cut edges of laminated pastry glues the layers and stops them rising.
- Pastry quantitiesFor a 9-inch double-crust pie, allow about 8 oz plain paste for the base and 8 to 10 oz puff for the lid, with 3 to 4 cups of mince-meat. That serves six to eight.
- ServingBest warm rather than hot straight from the oven, when the filling is still runny. Hard sauce, brandy butter or plain cream are usual accompaniments of the period.
Mince pie descends from medieval and early modern English pies that genuinely combined minced meat with dried fruit, spices and sugar, sweet and savoury being far less separated then than now. By the time Lowney's book appeared in the United States in the early twentieth century, the meat was on its way out: some American households still put in beef or tongue, but the fruit, suet and spirits carried the flavour, and "mock mince" made with crackers or green tomatoes was in circulation. That the pie is reduced here to a single line of assembly instructions suggests how familiar it was — mince-meat was something a cook either put up in quantity in autumn or bought ready-made. Its association with Christmas is long-standing in Britain and is often traced to older spiced festival pies, though the connection is customary rather than documented in any single origin.