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Lincoln Pie. Camp Little All--Right
1 pound of broken crackers or bread. 1 pound of brown sugar or molasses. 1/2 pound of currants. 1/2 pound of raisins. 1 ounce of mixed ground spices, chiefly cinnamon. 1 pint of cold water. 1/2 pint of hard cider, or vinegar and water. 1 pound of suet chop ed fine, or lard.
Some whisky and four eggs, if you are rich enough. Little salt. Soak the crackers or bread in the fluids awhile. Mix everything together. Cover the bottom of a baking pan with a very thin sheet of common short paste. Pour in the mixture to be 1 1/2 inches deep. Cover with another very thin sheet of paste. Brush over with milk. Bake to a light color in a slow oven about three quarters of an hour. Cut out squares either hot or cold.
A slab mock-mincemeat pie built from broken crackers and dried fruit, sized for a camp crew rather than a family. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities and the oven need translating.
- Start with the soakThe crackers or bread must sit in the pint of water plus the half-pint of cider until completely soft; the recipe says only "awhile," so judge by the crumb rather than the clock, and allow longer for hard crackers than for stale bread. With the eggs optional, the soaked crumb is doing most of the thickening, and any dry crumb left in the middle will show up as a gritty pocket.
- "Broken crackers"This means dry, unsweetened crackers or hardtack scraps, broken pieces rather than whole ones; the recipe does not say where they came from. Plain crackers or a dry, lean bread crumb both work; anything buttery or sweetened will throw the fat and sugar balance off.
- A slow ovenConventionally somewhere in the region of 300-325F. The filling is essentially already edible, so the bake is about setting the mass and cooking the two sheets of pastry; "bake to a light color" means just that, pale rather than browned.
- Time and donenessThree quarters of an hour is right for a filling only 1 1/2 inches deep in a wide pan. Judge it by the top crust being dry and firm and the filling no longer sloshing when the pan is nudged, not by color.
- An ounce of spiceRoughly 4 tablespoons of ground spice, mostly cinnamon, with cloves, allspice or nutmeg making up the rest. It reads as extreme by modern standards and it is deliberate: heavy spicing is what makes cracker crumbs, suet and brown sugar taste like mincemeat. Half that amount is still assertive if you would rather ease into it.
- Suet, lard and the optional luxuriesA pound of beef suet chopped fine, or lard, is the whole fat content; cut it and the squares turn dry and crumbly. The whisky is left unmeasured -- "some" -- and the four eggs would help bind the mixture; both are marked optional on grounds of expense, in the recipe's own words "if you are rich enough."
- "Common short paste"A plain lard or shortening pie crust, no sugar, rolled very thin. It is a wrapper, not a feature; how much you need depends on the pan you choose, and both sheets are meant to be very thin.
- Pan and yieldThe full quantity comes closer to filling a 9-by-13 pan to the specified 1 1/2 inch depth than a half-sheet. Cut into 2-inch squares that gives around two dozen substantial servings; it keeps and travels well.
This is mock mincemeat -- the fruit, spice, suet and cider of a Christmas mince pie with the meat left out and cracker crumbs standing in for both bulk and thickening. Pies of this shape turn up in institutional and camp cookery in the later nineteenth century, where broken crackers were cheap and a pie baked flat and cut into squares fed a crowd faster than round pies. Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook was written for hotel, restaurant and boarding-house bakers rather than home cooks, which fits both the scale and the frank accounting of what to leave out if the budget will not stretch: "some whisky and four eggs, if you are rich enough." The double title pairs a presidential name with what reads as a camp or crew nickname; what lies behind either half is not recorded here.