Home › Left-Over Cake and Beverages › Dainty Dishes from Little Bits
Dainty Dishes from Little Bits
sauces, bits of orange, cake-crumbs (dried for use as bread is dried). Combine to taste; do not have any one ingredient predominate, as there should be an indefinite flavor. Sweeten if necessary; if too sweet add lemon-juice. Cook in double boiler until it is of right consistency and looks rich. This mixture will keep two or three weeks if kept covered in a glass jar in a cool place.
For the pastry use rule for "Plain Pastry for Four Patty Pies" (see page 27), increasing the shortening to half as much again.
This is the tail end of a mock-mincemeat entry: stale cake crumbs, leftover sauces and odd bits of citrus cooked down into a pie filling. The proportions are deliberately left to the cook, which means the technique matters more than any ingredient list.
- What you are actually makingA sweet filling for small pies, built from whatever sweet leftovers the house had. The text as it survives names only sauces, bits of orange and dried cake-crumbs; the head of the list is missing, so nothing in it need be raw fruit.
- Cake-crumbs, dried "as bread is dried"Spread the crumbs on a sheet and dry them in a low oven without browning, then cool; the book gives no temperature. Dry crumbs absorb the liquid from the sauces and fruit; fresh ones turn the filling to paste.
- "Combine to taste" needs a ratio to start fromRoughly two parts fruit and sauce to one part dried crumbs by volume gives a filling that mounds on a spoon. Add crumbs a tablespoon at a time at the end rather than at the start.
- Double boiler, and whyA sugary crumb mixture scorches on direct heat and the burnt note will dominate everything. Over simmering water it will take some time, stirred occasionally, until a spoon drawn through leaves a track that closes slowly.
- Balancing itTaste as you go and again at the end, when the flavours have concentrated. Lemon juice is the correction the recipe offers for over-sweetness; add it a little at a time.
- StorageTwo or three weeks in a cool place assumed an unheated larder. This is a cooked mixture with no measured sugar or acid and no sealing, so treat it as an ordinary refrigerator item: covered, chilled, a week at most, or frozen.
- The pastry noteIncreasing the shortening by half again gives a richer, shorter crust. Keep the fat cold and the handling brief.
- Baking and yieldThe recipe gives no oven temperature or time; small filled pies want a hot oven, and since the filling is already cooked it only needs heating through while the pastry sets and colours. The pastry rule cited is for four patty pies, so the filling is meant to fill four small shells.
Mock mincemeat of this kind belongs to a long tradition of stretching or replacing an expensive festive filling: real mincemeat meant suet, raisins, candied peel, brandy and often shredded beef, all of it costly and none of it improvised. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks are full of substitutes built on crackers, green tomatoes, apples or, as here, dried cake crumbs, and the instruction that "there should be an indefinite flavor" is the whole argument for them: with enough spice, fruit and acid in the pot, no single cheap ingredient announces itself. The blunt admission that quantities depend on what happens to be in the pantry is typical of the form, and it is why so many of these recipes read as instructions to a cook rather than a formula.