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Mince Patties
Roll out a sheet of pie paste, or puff paste if preferred, very thin. Cut out flats with a large biscuit cutter. Put a spoonful of mincemeat, or lemon mincemeat, or mock mincemeat, on one of the flats, lay another on top and pinch the edges together all round. Egg them over, dredge, sugar and bake.
A bakeshop shorthand recipe: two rounds of pastry, a spoonful of filling, sealed and baked. The instructions assume you already know how a pie bench works, so the gaps are worth filling in.
- Seal cold, seal wellThe hinge here is the edge. Chill the cut rounds before filling, brush the rim of the bottom flat with water or egg, then press firmly all round with fingers or a fork. Warm, soft paste will not grip, and mincemeat boiling out onto the pan burns black in minutes.
- "Flats" and cutter sizeThe recipe gives no size; biscuit cutters came in a range, and a "large" one here is probably something in the region of 3 to 4 inches. The recipe cuts both rounds with the same cutter, but rolling the top round a shade thinner helps it stretch over the mound of filling.
- "Dredge, sugar"Dredging means sprinkling from a shaker, not coating in flour. After the egg wash, dust the tops with granulated sugar; it sets into a fine crackled glaze. This recipe sugars before baking, though sugar can also be dusted on hot from the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Pastry of this kind wants a fairly quick oven, 400 to 425F, for about 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are well coloured and the sugar has caught. A slack oven leaves the bottom flat pale and sodden.
- Vent the topsNot mentioned, but a small slit or two pricks in the upper flat lets steam escape. Sealed shut, the patties puff and split at the seam, which is where the filling escapes.
- The three mincemeatsOrdinary mincemeat of the period contained chopped beef or beef suet with apples, raisins and spirits. Lemon mincemeat leaned on lemon and its juice in place of the meat, though it often kept the suet; mock mincemeat used green tomatoes or soaked crackers with vinegar, sugar and spice to imitate the real thing cheaply. These fillings are made up in advance of the pastry, and the cooked keeping sorts will hold.
- Puff paste versus pie pastePuff paste gives a taller, flakier patty but shrinks and slides; if you use it, chill the assembled patties 20 minutes before they go in and bake at the higher end of the range so the layers lift before the fat runs.
- YieldA single batch of pastry for a two-crust 9-inch pie, rolled thin, should give something like a dozen patties at 3 inches, depending on how thin it goes and how much is lost to re-rolling. Reckon one filled patty per person for dessert.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of practical trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the late nineteenth century, and the compression of this entry is typical: it is written for a man with a bench, a rolling pin and a tub of mincemeat already made. Mincemeat itself began as a genuinely meaty preserve, spiced and enriched with suet and spirits in what is traditionally explained as a way of keeping chopped beef through the winter, and the English mince pie carried that ancestry into American kitchens. By the time this book was printed the meat was retreating; commercial and household mincemeats leaned ever harder on apples, raisins and suet, and the two alternatives named here show how far the substitution had gone. Lemon mincemeat and mock mincemeat, the latter often built on green tomatoes or soda crackers, were frugal stand-ins that kept the spice and the sweet-sour bite while dispensing with the beef altogether. Turning the pie into a hand-sized sealed patty was a commercial decision as much as a culinary one: it portioned itself, travelled to the table without a knife, and sold across a counter.