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Mince Pies
Prepare some puff, short or tart-paste, and roll it on a floured table to the thickness of one-fourth of an inch. Butter some large pie-plates and line them with the paste; fill each one with mincemeat, cover with rounds of the paste, trim round the edges, moisten and press them together. Bake for about thirty minutes in a brisk oven. Beat the whites of two or three eggs to a stiff froth; take out the pies when cooked, dip a paste-brush in the beaten egg, and brush them over with it. Sprinkle sugar over each and place them in the oven again to glaze for two or three minutes. Arrange the pies on a folded napkin placed on a dish, garnish with sprigs of holly, and serve while they are very hot.
A finishing method more than a filling recipe: Oscar assumes you already have mincemeat and pastry on hand, and concerns himself with the double crust and the meringue-style glaze. Two details carry the whole thing.
- Brisk oven"Brisk" in this period means a hot oven, roughly 400-425F, though the term was never precise. Bake on the lower third of the oven so the bottom crust sets before the filling boils, and check at 25 minutes for colour.
- The glaze is the pointThe egg-white wash goes on after baking, not before. Brushed on a hot crust, dusted with granulated sugar and returned for two or three minutes, it sets into a thin crackly white sheet. Put it on raw pastry and you get a dull varnish instead.
- Don't overshoot the glazeTwo to three minutes is literal. Beyond that the sugar caramelises unevenly and the whites brown in patches. Watch it rather than timing it.
- Pastry thicknessA quarter inch is thicker than most modern rolling; it is deliberate here, since the crust has to hold a wet, heavy filling through a hot bake. Keep it as written and chill the lined plates before filling.
- MincemeatPeriod mincemeat is a cooked, sugar- and spirit-preserved mixture, often containing beef suet and sometimes lean beef or ox tongue. Much modern jarred mincemeat is fruit-only, though some still contains suet, and it is generally sweeter; taste it before filling and cut back on the glazing sugar if it is very sweet.
- Pie-plates and pans"Large pie-plates" is all the recipe gives; a shallow plate rather than a deep-dish tin is the likely intention, but no size is specified. The instruction to butter them is worth keeping, since sugary filling that escapes will weld the crust to the metal.
- Seal the edges properlyThe recipe says only to moisten and press. Crimping firmly, and cutting a vent or two in the lid, will help if the mincemeat is very wet, though the original does not call for it.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the plates you use, and two or three egg whites will glaze several pies. The holly is table decoration only and is toxic if eaten -- remove it before cutting.
Mince pie began as a genuinely meat-filled pastry: medieval and early modern English recipes packed shredded mutton, beef or tongue with dried fruit, suet and the expensive imported spices that made the dish worth serving at Christmas. The meat receded over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until only the suet remained, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s a mince pie in an American hotel kitchen was essentially a fruit pie with a rich, spirit-soaked filling. The entry says nothing about the mincemeat itself, for reasons it does not explain. What Oscar contributes is hotel presentation: the sugar-and-egg-white glaze flashed under heat, the pies stacked on a folded napkin in what was then a general convention of the period, and the holly that fixes this firmly as a Christmas service dish.