Home › Pastry › Reliable Mince Meat
Reliable Mince Meat
1 bowl ground beef juice 2 oranges 1 bowl suet juice 1 lemon 1 bowl cider 6 tsp. salt 4 bowls apples 1 bowl molasses 2 tsp. Slade's cloves 2 bowls sugar 4 tsp. Slade's cinnamon 2 tsp. Slade's nutmeg 1 lb. raisins If you double the meat, double the rest. I have used this rule for 20 years with success.
— Mrs. Walter H. Cole
This is a proportion formula rather than a set of instructions: the book assumes any cook knows what to do with mincemeat once the ingredients are in the kettle. Here is what the shorthand means and what has to be filled in.
- The bowl is the unitEverything is measured against one bowl, so the absolute size matters less than keeping the ratio: 1 meat : 1 suet : 1 cider : 4 apples : 2 sugar : 1 molasses. Working with a 1-quart bowl gives something like ten quarts of raw mixture, which cooks down considerably — enough filling for several nine-inch pies.
- "Ground beef" is boiled beef"Ground beef" most likely means cooked beef -- mincemeat of this period usually starts from lean beef — chuck, shin or neck — simmered until tender, cooled, and then put through the grinder. Raw ground beef is probably not the intended ingredient here.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys; ask a butcher, since it is rarely on display. Chill it hard before grinding or chopping, and remove the papery membrane. Shredded packaged suet sold for puddings works, and unsalted butter is a poorer but usable substitute.
- Slade's spicesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a widely advertised spice packer, and the brand name is doing no work beyond identifying the tins in the pantry. Use any ground cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg; the teaspoon amounts are for spices freshly bought, so nudge them up if your jars are old.
- CiderSweet cider, not hard, is what a church cookbook of this date means. Unfiltered apple cider is the closest thing now; boiled cider or apple juice will do, with the juice slightly less lively.
- ApplesFour bowls means chopped, not whole — peeled, cored and chopped or coarsely ground. A firm tart variety holds its shape; softer dessert apples cook down into sauce.
- Cooking, which the recipe omitsCombine everything and simmer uncovered, stirring often, until the apples are soft, the liquid has reduced and the mixture is thick and dark — roughly an hour to an hour and a half. It scorches easily once the sugar concentrates, so keep the heat low and the spoon moving.
- StorageThe original assumed a cold cellar and a stone crock, and a mixture with meat in it does not keep safely at room temperature. Refrigerate for up to two weeks or freeze in pie-sized portions; if you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning procedure rather than improvising one.
- SaltSix teaspoons reads as a great deal but it is seasoning a large batch that also carries two bowls of sugar and a bowl of molasses. Add it, taste at the end of the simmer, and adjust then.
Mincemeat is the long survival of a medieval habit of cooking meat with dried fruit, sugar and spice in the same dish, and the beef and suet in this formula are the older element, not an oddity. By the time the Philathea Cook Book was compiled, commercial and meatless versions were already common, and one might read "reliable" in the title as doing real work: contributors to church and Sunday-school class cookbooks were vouching for a rule of their own. Mrs. Cole's note that she has used it for twenty years is the standard credential in books of this kind, where the authority is the neighbor rather than the author. The named brand of spice is a reminder that ground spices came from a tin with a label on it, and cooks referred to them by the packer's name the way one might say a brand of baking powder.