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Mince Pie
Mince Pie should always be made with two crusts. Line pie plate with paste, fill with mince meat, cover with paste and bake in hot oven 25 minutes.
A three-sentence recipe that assumes you already have mincemeat and a batch of pastry on hand, as the rest of the chapter would have supplied. The only real technique here is the double crust.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400 to 450F. The high heat is what sets and browns the bottom crust before the wet filling can soak into it.
- 25 minutes is shortPeriod mincemeat was generally made and cooked in advance, so the pie needs heating through rather than cooking. With cold filling straight from the jar, expect longer, and look for filling bubbling at the vents.
- Vent the topThe original does not say so, but mincemeat is wet and steams heavily. Cut several slits or a central hole, or the top crust lifts off the filling and the seam splits.
- "Paste"Plain pie pastry. You will need enough for two 9-inch rounds, top and bottom.
- Pie platePeriod pie plates were generally shallower than a modern deep-dish plate, which will hold more filling and need a longer bake. The recipe gives no size.
- Seal properlyDampen the rim of the lower crust, press the top down firmly and crimp. Mincemeat is syrupy and will run out and burn onto the plate at any gap.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight wedges. Hard sauce is a common period accompaniment; cheese is a regional one.
Mince pie began as a genuinely meaty dish: medieval and early modern English versions combined chopped beef or tongue with suet, dried fruit, and expensive spices such as cinnamon, clove and mace. By the time this book was printed the meat had thinned to a small quantity of lean beef and suet in a mass of apples, raisins, currants, sugar and cider or spirits, and commercially prepared mincemeat was available ready-made. That is likely why the recipe here is so brief: mincemeat was a separate project, or a purchase, and the cook needed only to be told what to do with it. Mincemeat was traditionally a closed pie, which is consistent with the insistence on two crusts here.