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Mock Mince Pie
Roll and crush 12 crackers, add to this ½ cup of vinegar, 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of of vinegar, 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of hot water, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 cup of currants and 1 cup of raisins. Makes 4 pies.
A cracker-crumb mincemeat with no meat, no suet and no spice list — the filling only, with the crust assumed. The transcription is garbled in the first line, so read the quantities with care before scaling.
- The vinegar lineThe printed page was checked; the measure is the half cup of vinegar our text now gives. The type of vinegar is not stated, so a mild cider vinegar is the safest choice.
- CrackersThe kind is not specified; a plain soda cracker rather than a sweet one is the likely intention. A dozen crush to something in the region of half a cup of crumbs, depending on cracker size, and it is these that thicken the liquid.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small wine-grape raisin — not fresh red or black currants, and not the fruit sold as cassis. Modern packaging often labels them "Zante currants."
- Let it standThe recipe gives no resting time, but the crumbs will absorb the hot water, vinegar and honey if the mixture is left to sit before it goes into the crust.
- Missing spicesMost nineteenth-century mock mince recipes carry spice, commonly cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. This one lists none, so as printed it is a sweet-sour fruit filling; whether the omission is deliberate or assumed cannot be told from the page.
- Yield"Makes 4 pies" is hard to reconcile with the quantities: the fruit, liquid and crumbs together come to something over five cups, which would fill one or two 9-inch pies generously. Four pies would mean small or thinly filled ones.
Mock mince pie belongs to a large family of "mock" dishes -- mock turtle soup, mock duck, mock oysters -- in which cheap pantry goods stand in for something expensive or out of season. Real mincemeat meant beef or venison, suet, brandy and a long curing period; a household without those, or one keeping a meatless table, could get a similar dark sweet-sour effect from crackers, vinegar, dried fruit and a sweetener. Cracker-crumb pies were common in American cookbooks through the early twentieth century, and the vinegar is the trick: acid plus dried fruit plus spice is what the palate reads as "mince," with or without the meat.