Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lemon Mince Pies
Lemon Mince Pies
Line some buttered patty-pans with thinly rolled puff paste, fill them half full of the lemon mincemeat, put a round of paste on the top of each, press together round the edges, dip a paste-brush in egg beaten together with a little water, brush the tops of the patties over, sprinkle powdered sugar on the top, and bake in a moderate oven. When cooked take them out of the pans, place them on a dish, and serve either hot or cold.
A short, assumption-heavy entry of the kind that fills the Waldorf book: Oscar expected a kitchen that already had puff paste and a crock of mincemeat on hand. The gaps are worth filling in before you start.
- Lemon mincemeatThis refers to a separate preparation given elsewhere in the book. Lemon mincemeats of the period are typically built on chopped lemon (peel and pulp) with apple, suet, dried fruit and sugar, and generally without beef. Commercial jarred mincemeat will work but is darker and heavier; a spoonful of grated lemon zest and a squeeze of juice stirred through brings it closer.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet or muffin tins, roughly 2 to 2½ inches across and about ¾ inch deep. A standard 12-cup muffin tin is deeper than intended; a mini-muffin or shallow tartlet tray gives the right pastry-to-filling ratio.
- "A moderate oven"The book gives no temperatures. "Moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F, which is gentle for puff paste, as it needs an initial blast of steam to rise. Bake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are risen and deep gold.
- Sugar on topPowdered sugar over an egg wash will scorch before the pastry is done at high heat. Sprinkle granulated or coarse sugar instead, or dust with confectioners' sugar after baking.
- Fill half fullTake this literally. Overfilled patties boil out at the seam; half full with a firmly pressed and crimped edge is what keeps them intact. A small slit or pinprick in each lid helps.
- Buttered pansPuff paste sheds enough butter that greasing is largely insurance, but do it anyway — the sugar that escapes at the edges will weld a pie to bare tin.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working estimate, about a pound of puff pastry with mincemeat to suit will make somewhere in the region of 18 to 24 small pies. They are best the day they are baked; refresh cold ones for five minutes at 350F rather than serving them limp.
Mince pies descend from the medieval and early modern meat pie, in which chopped beef or mutton was baked with dried fruit, suet and spice — the meat gradually dropped away over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until only the suet remained as a relic. Lemon mincemeat is one of the lighter Victorian offshoots, sharpened with whole chopped lemon, and it appears in English household manuals well before Oscar Tschirky put it into his 1896 Cook Book. Its presence in the Waldorf's pages is a reminder that the hotel's kitchen, for all its French menu language, drew heavily on the English repertoire for small pastries and savouries; a tray of hot patties could be served either hot or cold, as Oscar allows.