No. 117

Mince Meat

Suppress all fibers and skin from half a pound of beef kidney suet, chop it up very finely; have also chopped half a pound of cooked ox heart; seed and pick half a pound of Malaga raisins, half a pound of Smyrna raisins, half a pound of currants, chop up three ounces of citron, cut three ounces of candied orange peel into three-sixteenth of an inch squares, peel and chop finely two pounds of apples. Have two ounces of brown sugar, half an ounce of ground cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of grated nutmeg, a quarter of an ounce of allspice and ground ginger, and a quarter of an ounce of powdered coriander seeds, one pint of cider, one gill of rum, quarter of a gill of brandy and the peels and juice of two lemons. Mix all the ingredients together and put them into a stone crock leaving it in a cool place for at least fifteen days before using.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's mincemeat is a meat preserve held at cellar temperature for a fortnight, and the ratio of preservatives to perishables is well outside what current food-safety practice accepts. The notes below explain the terms and then the problem.

Why it failsTwo pounds of chopped apple, half a pound of cooked ox heart and half a pound of raw suet are mixed with only two ounces of sugar and about two and a half cups of cider, rum and brandy combined, then left to stand for at least fifteen days. That is a moist, barely sugared meat mixture held at ambient temperature, the condition in which spoilage organisms and food-poisoning bacteria multiply. Traditional mincemeats that kept safely relied on sugar in pound quantities, heavy spirit, or both.
The "cool place" is not a refrigeratorA nineteenth-century larder or stone-flagged cellar ran in the 40s to low 50s Fahrenheit and was itself only a delay, not a preservative. Moving the crock to a modern fridge does not convert an unmeasured cure into a safe one, and neither does adding more spirit by guess. If you want mincemeat with meat in it, use a current tested recipe with stated sugar, acid and storage conditions.
Ox heartBeef heart, sold by butchers and worth knowing as a lean, dense, close-grained muscle. Ranhofer specifies it already cooked but does not say how; simmering until tender before chopping would be the obvious method.
Kidney suetThe hard fat from around the beef kidney, the firmest and least likely to go rancid. Boxed shredded suet is the modern substitute; the instruction to strip fibre and membrane applies to the fresh article only.
Malaga and Smyrna raisinsTwo distinct raisins, not a flourish. Malaga were large muscatel raisins sold with the seeds in, which is why the recipe says to seed them; Smyrna were the smaller seedless Sultana type from what is now Izmir.
Citron and candied peelCitron here is the candied rind of Citrus medica, sold in blocks, not lemon peel and not the melon preserve sometimes sold under the name in the American South. Three-sixteenths of an inch is a scant quarter-inch dice.
Gills and ciderA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill of brandy is two tablespoons. The cider of the period was ordinarily fermented hard cider, not the sweet unpasteurised pressing sold under that name in the United States today.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" section is a set of building blocks meant to be drawn on by the hundreds of composed dishes that follow. Mincemeat belongs to a long English line in which chopped meat, suet, dried fruit and spice were packed together as a way of carrying autumn's abundance through winter, the sugar and spirit doing the preserving; the medieval and Tudor versions were emphatically meat pies, and the shift toward the all-fruit mincemeat familiar now happened gradually across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the suet outlasting the beef. Ranhofer's formula sits at the hinge: the meat is down to half a pound of heart against two pounds of apples and a pound and a half of dried fruit, more a savoury backbone than a main constituent. The spicing, with coriander alongside the expected cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and ginger, and the pairing of two named raisin varieties, is characteristic of a kitchen that bought imported groceries by the specific origin rather than the category.