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Mince-Meat (Take five or six pounds)
Take five or six pounds scraggy beef-a neck piece will do-and put to boil in water enough to cover it; take off the scum that rises when it reaches the boiling point, add hot water from time to time until it is tender, then remove the lid from the pot, salt, let boil till almost dry, turning the meat over occasionally in the liquor, take from the fire, and let stand over night to get thoroughly cold; pick bones, gristle, or stringy bits from the meat, chop very fine, mincing at the same time three pounds of nice beef suet; seed and cut four pounds raisins, wash and dry four pounds currants, slice thin a pound of citron, chop fine four quarts good-cooking tart apples; put into a large pan together, add two ounces cinnamon, one of cloves, one of ginger, four nutmegs, the juice and grated rinds of two lemons, one table-spoon salt, one tea-spoon pepper, and two pounds sugar. Put in a porcelain kettle one quart boiled cider, or, better still, one quart currant or grape juice (canned when grapes are turning from green to purple), one quart nice molasses or syrup, and, if you have any syrup left from sweet pickles, add some of that, also a good lump of butter; let it come to boiling point, and pour over the ingredients in the pan after having first mixed them well, then mix again thoroughly. Pack in jars and put in a cool place, and, when cold, pour molasses over the top an eighth of an inch in thickness, and cover tightly. This will keep two months. For baking, take some out of a jar, if not moist enough add a little hot water, and strew a few whole raisins over each pie. Instead of boiled beef, a beef's-heart or roast meat may be used; and a good proportion for a few pies is one-third chopped meat and two-thirds apples, with a little suet, raisins, spices, butter, and salt. The above is a good formula to use, but, of course, may be varied to suit different tastes or the material at hand. If too rich, add more chopped apples; in lieu of cider, vinegar and water in equal proportions may be used; good preserves, marmalades, spiced pickles, currant or grape jelly, canned fruit, dried cherries, etc., may take the place of raisins, currants and citrons. Wine or brandy is considered by many a great improvement, but if "it causeth thy brother to offend" do not use it. Lemon and vanilla extracts are often used, also preserved lemon or orange peel. The mince-meat is better to stand over night, or several days, before baking into pies, as the materials will be more thoroughly incorporated. Many prefer to freeze their pies after baking, heating them as needed.
This is a meat mincemeat of the old school, and the problem is not the pie but the jar. The storage instructions put cooked beef and suet in the danger zone for weeks, and no amount of spice or molasses fixes that.
- Why the storage failsFive or six pounds of beef and three of suet, cooked down, are packed into jars, sealed with an eighth-inch of molasses, and held for two months in a "cool place" — a nineteenth-century cellar, which would be cool but well above refrigeration temperature. That is within the temperature band where Clostridium botulinum can grow in a sealed, low-oxygen, low-acid meat mixture, and the molasses cap makes the anaerobic conditions better rather than worse.
- The acid is not reliableA quart of boiled cider or grape juice against this quantity of meat, suet and fruit does not bring the whole mass to a pH that inhibits pathogens, and the recipe explicitly permits swapping it for jelly, preserves or canned fruit. Longer-keeping mincemeats generally leaned on higher sugar concentration and a generous charge of brandy; here alcohol is optional, and the author leaves it out where it would give offence.
- No process, no measurementsThere is no heat process at all — the syrup is brought to a boil and poured over cold ingredients, which tempers the mixture but does not pasteurise it. Meat mincemeat can be preserved today, but only by pressure canning to a tested schedule, or by freezing. If you want to make this, use a current tested recipe.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat, sold by butchers and still used for British puddings. It is not the same as rendered tallow or the bird-feeder blocks sold under the same name; those are often mixed with seed and other fats.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from Citrus medica — thick-rinded, pale green, sold in blocks or diced at holiday time. It is not the same as the citron melon that also turns up in period preserving books.
- Boiled ciderFresh sweet cider reduced by simmering to roughly a seventh of its volume, giving a dark, tart syrup. It is still made in New England and available by mail; the recipe's fallback of half vinegar, half water is a much cruder substitute.
- CurrantsZante currants — small dried grapes — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Four pounds is a great deal, which tells you the scale here: this batch is meant to supply a household with pies for a season.
- Scraggy beefNeck, shin or any well-worked cut with connective tissue. The long simmer followed by boiling almost dry is a concentration step, driving the liquor back into the meat rather than pouring it off.
Mincemeat began as literal minced meat: medieval and early modern English cooks preserved beef, mutton or tongue in a paste of suet, dried fruit, sugar and spice, the sugar and the spices doing preserving work as much as flavouring. Through the nineteenth century the meat proportion shrank steadily until, by the twentieth, most commercial mincemeat contained only suet, and often not even that — which is why a modern reader meets this recipe expecting fruit and finds five or six pounds of neck beef instead. It appears to come from a late nineteenth-century American household cookery book, printed as a bulk preparation, the sort of thing made once in late autumn when apples, cider and the year's beef were all at hand. The aside about wine and brandy — "if it causeth thy brother to offend" — alludes to Paul (compare 1 Corinthians 8:13 and Romans 14:21) and marks the book squarely within the American temperance movement, which had a strong hold on domestic cookery writing of the period.