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Mince Meat
The following is an excellent recipe for mince meat and it will fill twelve to fourteen quart jars: Chop fine six pounds of cooked beef and mix with two pounds of chopped suet; add twelve pounds of chopped apples, five pounds of raisins, three and a half pounds currants, one pound of citron and two pounds of brown sugar; mix thoroughly and then add seven cups of molasses, two tablespoonfuls of cinnamon, three of nutmeg, two quarts of sweet cider, one quart of boiled cider, three cups of sherry wine and one pint of brandy. Cook twenty minutes, stirring frequently.
This is a full winter's supply of mincemeat, not a pie's worth: roughly 40 pounds of ingredients before the liquids go in. The proportions scale down cleanly, and the fruit and spirits matter more than the beef.
- Scale it down firstTwelve to fourteen quart jars is 24 to 28 pints of filling. At roughly three cups per nine-inch double-crust pie, that is on the order of sixteen to nineteen pies. A quarter of the recipe still fills a large stockpot and yields three or four quarts; an eighth is a sensible trial batch.
- Do not can it in a boiling-water bathSugar, cider and brandy notwithstanding, mincemeat containing beef and suet is a low-acid, meat-based product by current standards and cannot be safely processed the way period cooks processed it. Refrigerate it, or freeze it in pint containers, where it keeps for months and improves for the first few weeks.
- The beefUse lean stewing beef, chuck or shin, simmered plain in unsalted water until tender, then cooled and chopped fine rather than pureed. Cook it a day ahead; cold meat chops far more cleanly than warm. Reserve none of the cooking liquid, the recipe has liquid enough.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys and is best ordered from a butcher; the packaged shredded suet sold for puddings works in the same weight. Chill it hard and grate it, or pulse it with a little of the sugar so it does not smear.
- Boiled cider is not the same as sweet ciderSweet cider is fresh unfermented apple cider. Boiled cider is that cider reduced by roughly seven-eighths to a dark, tart syrup, still sold by New England producers. A quart of boiled cider is a great deal of concentrate and is the backbone of the flavor; unreduced cider substituted for it will leave the mixture thin and flat.
- CitronCandied citron, the thick preserved peel of a large citrus, sold in tubs at Christmas. Candied orange and lemon peel in equal weight is the usual modern stand-in. It is not the same thing as the fruit sold as citron melon.
- ApplesTwelve pounds is a little over a peck, or thirty-five or so medium apples, peeled and cored before weighing if you want the full measure of fruit. Choose a firm tart variety that holds its shape, such as Northern Spy, Baldwin or Granny Smith.
- Twenty minutes is the minimum, not the maximumThe cooking time only marries the mixture; the fruit will still be distinct. Stir often and use the widest heavy pot you have, because seven cups of molasses and two pounds of sugar scorch quickly on the bottom once the apples release their liquid.
- The spirits go in at the endAdding the sherry and brandy with the rest, as written, boils most of the alcohol off. Cooks who want the liquor to carry hold back part of the brandy and stir it into the cooled mincemeat, which also helps it keep in the refrigerator.
Mincemeat is the surviving trace of a much older English way with meat, in which spices, dried fruit and sugar seasoned beef and mutton rather than accompanying them; medieval and Tudor "shred pies" and "Christmas pyes" were essentially this mixture in a coffin of pastry. By the nineteenth century the meat was already retreating, and the American mincemeat of the following century became mostly apple with a little suet for richness, until many commercial jars dropped the beef altogether. A recipe like this one, with six pounds of beef against twelve of apples, sits at the midpoint of that long retreat. Its logic is practical: mincemeat was autumn work, made once when apples and cider were cheap and beef was being put up, then drawn on through the winter for pies, tarts and turnovers. The sherry and brandy are preservative as much as flavoring, and temperance-era household books often offered a second, spirit-free version alongside.