Mince Pies
Mince pies should be always baked with two crusts.
For Thanksgiving and Christmas pies, Puff Paste is often used for rims and upper crusts, but is never satisfactory when used for under crusts. 4 lbs. lean beef 2 lbs. beef suet Baldwin apples 3 quinces 3 lbs. sugar 2 cups molasses 2 quarts cider 4 lbs. raisins, seeded and cut in pieces Mince Pie Meat I 3 lbs. currants 1½ lb. finely cut citron 1 quart cooking brandy 1 tablespoon cinnamon and mace 1 tablespoon powdered clove 2 grated nutmegs 1 teaspoon pepper Salt to taste Cover meat and suet with boiling water and cook until tender, cool in water in which they are cooked; the suet will rise to top, forming a cake of fat, which may be easily removed. Finely chop meat, and add it to twice the amount of finely chopped apples. The apples should be quartered, cored, and pared, previous to chopping, or skins may be left on, which is not an objection if apples are finely chopped. Add quinces finely chopped, sugar, molasses, cider, raisins, currants, and citron; also suet, and stock in which meat and suet were cooked, reduced to one and onehalf cups. Heat gradually, stir occasionally, and cook slowly two hours; then add brandy and spices.
This is mincemeat on a nineteenth-century household scale — the finished mixture runs to something like twelve to fourteen quarts, enough for a dozen or more pies. The pastry note at the head is the whole of the baking instruction, so the numbers below fill that gap.
- The apples are the missing measurementThe list gives "Baldwin apples" with no quantity because the amount is set by the meat: twice the volume of chopped apple to chopped meat. How much whole fruit that comes to depends on how much the cooked beef yields, so measure the chopped meat first and chop apples to twice that volume rather than working to a stated weight.
- Ambiguous spice line"1 tablespoon cinnamon and mace" could mean a tablespoon of each or a tablespoon of the two combined. Given the batch size, a tablespoon of each is the more likely reading and still tastes restrained across fourteen quarts.
- Apple and quince substitutesBaldwins are a firm, tart-sweet New England keeper, now grown mainly by heirloom orchards. Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening or Granny Smith behave the same way. Quinces are hard and never eaten raw; they need the same coring and chopping as the apples and will not soften until the two-hour simmer.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, sold by butchers on request and not interchangeable with trimmings or shortening. Note that the method has you skim off and reserve the fat cake that rises when the cooking water cools, then return it to the mixture — nothing is discarded.
- Cider and cooking brandyIn American usage of this period "cider" usually meant fresh unfermented apple cider, though the recipe does not specify; hard cider works and gives more acidity. "Cooking brandy" most likely meant the cheap bottle rather than a separate product. Both brandy and spices go in only after the two hours of cooking, so the alcohol and the volatile oils largely survive.
- Reducing the stockThe meat broth reduces to 1½ cups and goes back in. Do this in a separate pan while the fruit mixture heats; it concentrates the gelatin that gives old-style mincemeat its body.
- StorageThe recipe gives no storage instruction at all; a mixture like this was kept cold and relied on sugar, acid and spirit to keep the meat. Refrigerate or freeze it instead — this is a cooked meat mixture and no safe-canning process is given here. Frozen in pie-sized portions it keeps well for months.
- Baking the piesFor a 9-inch two-crust pie, fill generously, vent the top, and bake at 425F for about 35 to 40 minutes until the crust is browned and the filling bubbles at the slits. The filling is already fully cooked, so you are only baking pastry.
Mincemeat is the surviving descendant of the medieval spiced meat pie, in which sugar, dried fruit and imported spices were used with beef or mutton rather than against it; the sweet-savory line that modern cooks draw simply was not there. By 1896, when Fannie Farmer compiled this book at the Boston Cooking School, mincemeat had become a seasonal fixture rather than an everyday dish — the note about Thanksgiving and Christmas pies is the tell, and so is the sheer size of the batch, which assumes a family that will bake pies all winter from one November afternoon's work. New England had its own attachment to the pie: mince pie at Thanksgiving was regional orthodoxy, and it is often said that Puritan suspicion of Christmas mince pies in the seventeenth century did nothing to dislodge them. The beef gradually dropped out over the twentieth century, leaving suet, then leaving fat altogether, until most commercial jars of today are meatless, though some still list beef or beef suet.