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Good Common Mince-Meat
2 pounds of minced beef or tongue. 3 pounds of suet. 4 pounds of currants. 3 pounds of apples. 1 pound of raisins. 1 pound of brown sugar. 1 ounce of mixed ground spices. 1 pound of candied citron, or the same of orange and lemon rinds boiled tender. 1 pint of common brandy. 3 quarts of cider, or enough to make it juicy.
Put the raisins in whole. Mince all the rest, seasoning the meat and suet a little with salt and pepper. Should be kept 3 or 4 weeks before using. Makes about 40 or 50 pies.
Nothing is saved by buying trashy currants. They have to be well washed and picked over free form stones, and the more dirt there is the more will wash away. Some currants are like small raisins, nice and clean and large. There is no waste in them.
TO CLEAN CURRANTS.--Put them into a colander with holes not too large; set that down in a pan half full of warm water and stir the currants about vigorously. The dirt will go through the holes. Pour the water away two or three times. This is the quickest plan and most thorough. Spread the currants out in a baking pan; pick them over and let them dry for use. TO CLEAN RAISINS.--When sultana seedless are furnished, or even the larger kind of seedless raisins, put them in a colander with a handful of flour mixed in, and rub off the fine stems, which then by sifting about will fall through the holes. When the greater part have been so got rid of, the raisins must be picked over separately, especially to remove the gravel stones may chance to be among them. Layer raisins have to be seeded to be good in anything. A most tedious operation and requiring such help as can be had. Some thirty years ago the English Vegetarians made a good deal of noise in the world. Their headquarters was in the Channel Islands, where their representative paper was published. It was called the Vegetarian Banner and Manx Healthian Journal. Its motto was "Fruits and Farinacea, the Proper Food of Man." Its leading idea was, that abstinence from meat diet would make the world better. Those who supported it set themselves to work earnestly to get up a new system of cookery wherein meat should have no place, and a great many curiosities in the way of bills-of-fare of dinners without meat were published in it in consequence. The annexed is one of their receipts. The cider excepted.
This is a full barrel-sized batch of old-style meat mincemeat, and the storage instruction is the part that cannot be carried over. The notes below explain the problem and decode the vocabulary.
- Why it fails: meat held for weeks with no temperature givenThe beef or tongue and three pounds of suet are minced, seasoned and then "kept 3 or 4 weeks before using" with no cooking step, no cure, no stated storage temperature and no vessel described. Such a mixture would presumably have been kept somewhere cold, a cellar or unheated pantry in winter, but the recipe never says so; at any ordinary indoor temperature this is raw ground meat and raw fat sitting for a month.
- Why it fails: the preservation is unmeasuredWhat keeps the mixture is the combination of sugar, alcohol and cider acidity against a large mass of meat and fat. A pint of "common brandy" and three quarts of cider spread through some fifteen pounds of solids gives no reliable concentration, and the cider quantity is deliberately open-ended ("or enough to make it juicy"). There is nothing here to measure or verify, which is exactly why modern preserving practice will not accept it. Use a current tested recipe if you want mincemeat with meat in it.
- Why it fails: the risk is not cooked awayBaking the finished pies does address the filling that goes into them, but the hazard in this method is the four weeks before that, when spoilage organisms and toxins can develop in a warm, moist, protein-rich mass. Heat later does not undo everything that happens earlier.
- Currants are not fresh currantsThroughout this book "currants" means dried Zante currants, small seedless grapes sold loose and, at the time, genuinely full of grit and stones. The washing and picking-over instructions belong to an era before packaged dried fruit and are no longer needed.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys. It is still sold by butchers and as shredded packaged suet in Britain, but it is not a supermarket staple in the United States.
- Layer raisins"Layer" raisins were bunches dried and packed in flat layers, sold with seeds in — hence the tedious seeding the author complains about. Seedless sultanas, mentioned first in the cleaning note, are the labour-saving alternative.
- ScaleAt roughly fifteen pounds of fruit, meat and fat plus three quarts of liquid, the stated yield of forty to fifty pies is a very large batch by modern domestic standards.
Mincemeat began as an actual meat dish: the spiced, dried-fruit, suet-bound pies of medieval and early modern England, sometimes called shred pies, in which the fruit and spice were as much preservative as flavouring. Through the nineteenth century the meat share shrank steadily, and by the twentieth the beef had dropped out of most commercial mincemeat altogether, leaving the suet and eventually only the fruit "u2014 which is why a recipe headed "good common mince-meat" opens with two pounds of beef or tongue and reads strangely now. The scale of the thing is striking: a forty-to-fifty-pie yield, and frank talk about buying decent dried fruit rather than cheap gritty stock. The closing digression changes subject entirely: the mid-century British vegetarian press, whose meatless mincemeat comes next — "The annexed is one of their receipts. The cider excepted."