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Mince Pie
Make enough pie paste for two crusts. Line the bottom of a deep pie tin with the paste, fill it full to overflowing with prepared mincemeat, put on top crust which has been cut in several places to allow steam to escape. Bake at 450 degrees, hot oven, 10 minutes, reduce heat of oven to 425 degrees, slightly lower, and continue baking until pie is nicely browned--about 1/2 hour. Mince meat is often prepared at home for the holidays, according to the family recipe.
A plain assembly recipe that assumes you already have mincemeat on hand, cooked and seasoned. Everything here is about the crust.
- The filling is already cookedMincemeat, whether homemade or from a jar, is a finished preserve. The oven's only job is to set and brown the pastry, which is why the whole bake runs hot and short.
- The oven numbers450F for the first 10 minutes sets the bottom crust before the filling can soak it; 425F for the remaining half hour finishes it. That is a hot bake by current standards -- check at 20 minutes and tent the rim with foil if the edge is colouring faster than the top.
- "Deep pie tin"Probably a pie plate of around 9 inches with sloping sides rather than a modern shallow tart pan; the recipe gives no size. Metal or glass both work; glass lets you see whether the base has browned.
- Filling it "to overflowing"Mincemeat barely shrinks, so a heaped fill is what the recipe intends. Set the tin on a rimmed baking sheet -- sugar-heavy filling that escapes a vent will burn onto the oven floor.
- Pastry quantity"enough for two crusts" is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups flour with fat in proportion for a double crust of this size. The recipe does not say what fat to use.
- The ventsCut the slashes before the top goes on, while the round is flat, rather than sawing at pastry stretched over a mounded filling. Steam that cannot escape lifts the lid off the fruit and leaves a hollow.
- CoolingLet it stand at least an hour. Hot mincemeat is loose and will run when cut; it firms as it cools.
- YieldOne pie of this size, six to eight servings. Hard sauce or brandy butter is a common accompaniment for mince pie, though this recipe does not mention one.
Mince pie began as a genuinely meaty dish: medieval and early modern English versions combined chopped beef or mutton with suet, dried fruit, sugar and the warm spices that had come into the kitchen through the spice trade, the sweetness and the fruit acting as much as preservative as flavouring. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat receded, in many recipes to suet alone, though beef mincemeat persisted in American home recipes well into the twentieth century -- which is why this book can say only that mincemeat is "often prepared at home... according to the family recipe" and leave it at that. Its fixed place at Christmas is old and much embroidered; the story that Puritan authorities banned it outright is traditional rather than well documented, though seventeenth-century objections to the feast certainly took in the pie. Commercial jarred and condensed mincemeat was widely available by the time such recipes were printed, but this book still points the reader to the family recipe, and confines itself to the crust.