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English Standard Mince-Meat
2 pounds of lean roast or boiled beef. 2 pounds of suet. 2 pounds of apples. 2 pounds of currants. 2 pounds of seedless raisins. 2 pounds of brown sugar. 1 pound of candied citron. 1/2 pound of orange or lemon rinds, previously boiled tender. 2 ounces of ground spices--mace, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. 3 quarts of sweet cider. 1 quart of common brandy.
Chop the meat and suet fine, and season them with a little salt and pepper. Cut the citron in small bits, mince the lemon rinds, and chop or cut the raisins. Mix all together and let stand two weeks before using. If too dry, wine, cider or brandy, or all mixed, should be added when the pies are filled. Candied orange or lemon peel, of course, can be used instead of the stewed peel, but costs more and gives less flavor. This is enough for 50 or 60 pies, according to size.
With a standard like the foregoing receipt to start from, anyone can vary the quality and cost of mince meat, according to circumstances. Apples in excess make it poor and insipid. Raisins, currants and orange peel, and wine or sweet cider, make it rich. The meat is only a foundation. Cheap mince-meat is made by dosing with ground spices, and leaving out the more expensive materials.
A professional bakers' batch: roughly 13 pounds of solids and a gallon of liquid, enough for the fifty to sixty pies the author promises. Almost nobody needs that, so the first job is arithmetic.
- Scale it downDivide everything by eight and you get a manageable batch, corresponding to six to eight of the author's pies; he says his yield varies "according to size," so judge by the filling each of your own pies takes. The proportions hold at any scale; the two-week rest does not shorten.
- Storage is the real issueThis was written for a cold cellar or unheated pantry, and the two weeks of standing was meant to happen at larder temperature. Cooked beef and suet in dilute cider is not a shelf-stable preserve by current standards — the 3 quarts of cider against 1 quart of brandy works out to well under 10 percent alcohol. Keep the crock refrigerated for the ripening period and thereafter, and use it within a few weeks. If you want long storage, follow a current tested canning or freezing procedure rather than this text.
- Sweet ciderIn American usage of this period "sweet cider" means unfermented apple cider, the cloudy pressed juice, as opposed to hard cider. Modern pasteurised apple cider is the right substitute; clear filtered apple juice is thinner and sweeter.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Seedless raisins" in this period may mean the small seedless sultana types; ordinary dark raisins are fine, and the instruction to chop them still matters for texture in a pie.
- SuetBeef suet — the hard fat from around the kidneys — is a butcher's order now, not a supermarket item. Shredded packaged suet sold for baking works; buy it cold and keep it cold, since warm suet smears rather than chopping fine.
- Candied citron and the boiled peelCitron is the thick-rinded Citrus medica, candied in translucent green or amber cubes and still sold at Christmas. The author's own peel, "previously boiled tender," means simmering orange or lemon rind until soft — this is the cheaper and, he argues, better-flavoured route.
- Two ounces of spiceThat is about 8 to 10 tablespoons of ground mace, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon combined, for the full batch — an eighth of that, roughly 1 tablespoon total, at the reduced scale. Weigh rather than measure by volume if you can; ground spice varies enormously in density.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsNo oven instruction is given. For a modern double-crust pie, bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom, then 375F for another 30 to 35 minutes until the crust colours and the filling bubbles at the vents. The beef is already cooked, but the suet and apples are not, so the bake is doing more than colouring pastry.
- The author's own advice is the best line in it"The meat is only a foundation." Adjust upward with raisins, currants, peel and cider rather than with spice, and resist the temptation to stretch it with apples — he is right that they flatten the flavour.
Mincemeat began as literal minced meat: medieval and early modern English cooks baked spiced, dried-fruited beef, mutton or tongue in pastry, a practice often explained as a way of using expensive imported spice and sugar to season and preserve flesh through winter. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat shrank and the fruit grew, and by the twentieth century commercial British mincemeat had dropped meat altogether. This receipt sits at the hinge: beef is still present, but the author flatly calls it "only a foundation." What makes the entry characteristic of The American Pastry Cook is that it is written as a costing exercise for a working bakeshop from which the baker can move up or down the price scale, with a candid note on how cheap mincemeat is faked by "dosing with ground spices" in place of raisins, peel and wine.