Home › Miscellaneous › Mince Pie
Mince Pie
Mince-meat Paste Prepare the paste according to recipe for paste, and use the mince-meat prepared according to either recipe for mincemeat.
This is an assembly note rather than a full method: the book expects you to turn back to its pastry and mincemeat entries and simply put the two together. What follows fills in the steps that a 1910s cook would have taken for granted.
- "Paste" means pastryIn books of this period paste is short crust or puff paste, not a paste in the modern sense. Keep the fat and water cold and rest the dough before rolling, since a mincemeat pie is rolled thin and handled twice.
- The hinge: cool, thick fillingMincemeat should be at room temperature or cooler and no wetter than a thick jam when it goes into the shell. Warm or syrupy filling steams the base and gives a soggy bottom crust.
- Sealing and ventingBrush the rim with water, press the top crust down firmly, and cut several slits or a central hole. Fruit mincemeat expands and will lift an unvented lid clear of the filling.
- Yield and servingServe barely warm rather than hot; the spices read better once the filling has firmed slightly. Hard sauce or plain cream is a usual accompaniment of the period.
Mincemeat began as exactly what its name says, minced meat, preserved with dried fruit, sugar, spirits and spice, and the beef and suet lingered in British and American recipes long after the mixture had become a dessert. Meatless versions are generally traced to the same nineteenth-century drift toward sweetness. The bare cross-reference here is also characteristic of the genre, which built pies out of numbered component recipes for paste and filling on the assumption that a cook already knew how to line a plate, fill it and cut a vent.