No. 3089

Mince Pie

"Mince Pie"

Take a tin pie plate and line it with foundation paste (No. 135); on the edge fasten a puff paste (No. 146) band three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness and three-quarters of an inch wide; fill the hollow in the plate with mincemeat (No. 117), wet the edge and cover over with a puff paste flat the same diameter, fastening it on firmly to the edges, egg the surface and trace on top some fanciful designs with the tip of a small knife; pinch all around and push in the oven to bake for an hour to an hour and a quarter. As soon as done remove to the oven door, bestrew with fine sugar and replace it in the oven for a few moments to glaze.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you already have the three components made and cross-references them by number; the recipe here is really an assembly and baking instruction. The whole thing rests on the puff paste band, which is what gives the pie its height and its crisp rim.

The band is the pointRather than a single crust, a strip of puff paste about 3/16 in. thick and 3/4 in. wide is laid around the rim of the lined plate, then the lid seals to it. It rises into a raised collar and keeps the top from sinking into the filling; skip it and you have an ordinary two-crust pie.
Foundation paste and puff pasteNo. 135 is Ranhofer's foundation paste, his lining pastry; No. 146 is his puff paste. A good all-butter shortcrust and a block of decent commercial puff paste stand in perfectly well.
Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in 1894; the direction is only to "push in the oven to bake for an hour to an hour and a quarter." Puff paste generally wants a hot start, so the heat has to be judged by the cook rather than read off the page.
Tin pie plateRanhofer means a thin tinned-steel plate, which conducts heat quickly and browns the bottom crust. Glass and ceramic are slower; if you use them, give the pie a preheated baking sheet underneath.
The mincemeat is already madeNo. 117 is Ranhofer's mincemeat, a cooked meat-based mixture of the period sort, beef and suet with dried fruit, sugar, spices and spirits. It goes into the shell ready-made, so the bake time is governed by the pastry, not the filling. Fill generously but not domed, or the seal will blow.
"Egg the surface"A whole beaten egg, or yolk with a splash of water, brushed thinly. Keep it off the cut edges of the puff paste band, where it glues the layers shut and blocks the rise.
"Fine sugar" and the glazeFine sugar here is most likely caster or superfine sugar rather than confectioners'. It is dusted on the hot pie and, as the recipe directs, returned to the oven only long enough to melt to a gloss, a minute or two.
YieldThe recipe gives no diameter; it makes one pie the size of whatever tin plate you line, cut into six or eight wedges. Rich enough that small wedges are correct.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put mince pie among the hot entremets in The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York — which tells you that by the late nineteenth century a dish of English ancestry had been absorbed into French restaurant service and given a puff-paste finish. Mincemeat is traditionally explained as a way of keeping meat with sugar, dried fruit, spirits and spice, and Ranhofer's No. 117 is still a meat mixture, not the meatless fruit filling that jarred mincemeat became during the twentieth century. The pie's association with Christmas is old and often noted in English sources; American cookbooks of this period treat it as a winter standby generally, with crocks of mincemeat put up in the autumn and drawn on for months.