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Mince Pie (II)
Mrs. James Morgan.
Boil beef until tender (three pounds after it is boiled); when cold, chop fine; add three pounds of fine chopped suet, and mix with the beef; add a tablespoon of salt, six pounds of apples, four pounds of currants, six pounds of raisins, two pounds of citron; season to taste with powdered cinnamon, mace, cloves, and nutmeg; add boiled cider, brandy, and wine until quite soft ; mix well and pack in stone jars, pour brandy over the top and cover tightly. This will make about five gallons; add two pounds sugar.
A farmhouse mincemeat on a scale almost no modern household has a use for, and preserved by a method that modern food safety does not accept.
- Why the storage failsCooked beef and suet are packed cold into stone crocks, sealed under a film of brandy, and kept for weeks at cellar temperature. Nothing in the process brings the packed jars to a temperature that destroys Clostridium botulinum spores, and the mixture's moisture, low acidity and dense fat layer are exactly the low-oxygen conditions in which those spores can produce toxin. The alcohol poured over the top does not penetrate the mass.
- The sugar is not doing preserving workTwo pounds of sugar spread through roughly five gallons of fruit and meat is a seasoning quantity, not a preserving one. Older fruit-and-meat mincemeats that kept were generally sweeter and more acid and were held in cool cellars, but the conditions varied household to household and are not repeatable. Meat mincemeat today is made to a tested recipe and either pressure-canned or frozen.
- ScaleAbout five gallons, or roughly forty to fifty pounds of filling — enough for twenty-odd nine-inch pies. This was written for a household that baked through a whole winter, not for a single sitting.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced by long simmering to a thick, tart syrup, once a standard country sweetener. It is still sold by New England producers; it is not the same thing as cider vinegar or as commercial apple juice concentrate.
- SuetHard beef kidney fat, three pounds of it here, matching the meat pound for pound. It is a butcher's item rather than a supermarket one, and shredded packet suet sold for puddings is a different product again — the vegetarian kinds are made from hydrogenated vegetable fat.
- Currants and citron"Currants" means dried Zante currants, small black grapes, not fresh red or black currants. Citron is the thick candied peel of Citrus medica, sold in cubes at holiday baking season and much firmer than candied orange or lemon peel.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current tested recipe with specified sugar, acid and processing times. Reading this one is worth doing; following it is not.
Mincemeat began as genuine minced meat — a medieval and early modern way of stretching beef or tongue with dried fruit, spice and suet, the sugar and spices doing double duty as flavour and as preservative. By the later nineteenth century, when community cookbooks like this one were being compiled, meatless versions were appearing alongside meat ones, which may be one reason a book will print several mince pie recipes side by side: one with beef, one without, one with only suet. The contributor's name at the head of the recipe is characteristic of the genre. These books were assembled by church and charitable committees from the manuscript receipts of local women, and a five-gallon batch signed "Mrs. James Morgan" came with the authority of a named local cook. The brandy poured over the top and the tightly covered stone jar reflect a period when the cool cellar was the only refrigeration a household had, and when a winter's worth of pie filling was a reasonable thing to lay down in November.