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Appleless Mince-Meat
Chop fine eight pounds green tomatoes, add six pounds sugar, one ounce each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice, simmer slowly till tomatoes are clear, then put away in a covered jar. For pies in winter, take in the proportion of two-thirds tomatoes and one-third meat, and season with butter, boiled cider, sugar if needed, etc., as regular mince pies would be seasoned.
This is a sugar preserve meant to be laid down in autumn and drawn on all winter, and the storage instruction is where it fails by current standards. The notes below explain the ingredients and the specific problem.
- The storage is the fatal stepThe storage is the weak step -- "put away in a covered jar" specifies no sealing, no boiling-water process and no processing time, so nothing in the recipe establishes whether the contents are shelf stable. A current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority should be used instead.
- Green tomatoes are a low-acid vegetableTomatoes are borderline in acidity -- modern canning guidance treats them as needing added lemon juice or citric acid in measured amounts before any process, and this recipe adds none. The sugar works out at six pounds to eight pounds of tomatoes, about 43 percent by weight before reduction, which is below the concentration normally relied on to hold a preserve by sugar alone; how far the long simmer raises it is not knowable from the text. An unacidified, unprocessed preserve of borderline acidity held in a sealed container at room temperature is the situation modern guidance warns about, including the risk of Clostridium botulinum.
- The winter step compounds itThe winter step is equally unspecified -- the preserve is mixed with meat and baked in a pie, but no cooking time or temperature is given for the meat or for the finished pie, so nothing in the text establishes a reliable heat step for a preserve that has been kept for months.
- Weights and spice quantitiesAn ounce each of cloves, cinnamon and allspice is by weight, not volume — about 4 to 5 tablespoons of ground cloves, which is heavy-handed even for mincemeat and reflects an era when spice was the main flavour signal in a pie.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced to about a seventh of its volume, thick and sharp. It was a farm staple and still sold by New England producers; it is not the same thing as cider vinegar or hard cider.
Appleless mincemeat belongs to a family of thrift recipes that appear across late nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, all built on the same premise: the spices, sugar, butter and boiled cider carry the flavour of a mince pie, so the apple is doing structural rather than essential work and can be replaced by whatever the garden has too much of. Green tomatoes were one substitute among several, and they recommended themselves because a frost ends the tomato crop while a good deal of fruit is still hard and unripe, and their firm flesh holds its shape in a slow simmer much as apple does. The Dixie Cook Book, like its Midwestern sibling Buckeye Cookery, was assembled from contributed household receipts, and pages like this one show a kitchen economy in which nothing edible left the garden unpreserved and the winter pie shelf was stocked in September. The technique — chop, weigh against sugar, simmer until the fruit turns clear, crock it — is the standard preserve method of the period, applied to a vegetable.