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Mince Pie
Mrs. Carson.
Three cups chopped cooked meat, six cups of apples chopped fine; make moist with boiled cider and sweeten with molasses or dark sugar; spice to your taste, using cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and a very little black pepper put currants and raisins into the pies when ready to bake.
Mrs. Carson gives proportions and flavourings but no oven, no crust and no yield, which was normal in a book written for cooks who already knew how to line a pie plate. The points below fill in what she assumed.
- The meat"Chopped cooked meat" would usually have meant beef, boiled until tender, cooled, and chopped fine by hand; neck, shin and tongue were all used. Cook and chill it before chopping; warm meat smears rather than cuts, and a food processor will turn it to paste in seconds.
- Boiled ciderNot cider that has been brought to the boil, but sweet cider reduced by roughly seven to one to a dark, tart syrup. It is sold again by New England producers; pomegranate molasses is the nearest common substitute, and plain apple juice is not, as it lacks the acid and the concentration.
- No suet is listedMany other mince recipes of the era carry chopped suet or beef fat, which keeps the filling from drying in the oven. If your boiled beef is very lean, work in 4 to 6 oz of grated suet or the fat skimmed from the cooking broth.
- Spice quantities"Spice to your taste" for this volume of filling means roughly a tablespoon each of cinnamon and allspice and a teaspoon of cloves as a starting point. The "very little black pepper" is deliberate and worth keeping: a quarter teaspoon lifts the sweetness without reading as pepper.
- Cook the filling firstShe does not say to cook the mixture before it goes into the crust. If you prefer, simmer the meat, apples, cider and sugar together until the apples collapse and the mixture thickens, then cool it; a filling assembled raw is more likely to release liquid in the oven and wet the bottom crust.
- Currants and raisins at the endShe adds them when the pies are filled rather than into the pot; she gives no reason, though it would keep them plump rather than stewed. Scatter about a cup of each over the filling as you assemble, or fold them in off the heat.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven. A double-crust pie of this size wants a hot start to set the pastry, around 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 30 to 40 minutes until the crust is browned and the vents steam.
- YieldNine cups of chopped solids plus fruit makes enough for about two 9-inch double-crust pies, with some left over. Keep any surplus refrigerated and use it within a few days.
Mince pie in nineteenth-century America was still a real meat pie, a direct descendant of the medieval English pies of spices, dried fruit and sugar with chopped meat, though the old story that the spices served to preserve and disguise the meat is folk tradition rather than documented fact. Recipes like this one sit at the midpoint of a long retreat: the beef is here, but it is outnumbered two to one by apples, and over the following decades published versions increasingly dropped the meat and kept only the suet, a transition that ran well into the twentieth century. Boiled cider and molasses point to a New England kitchen, where cider was reduced in quantity each autumn as a sweetener and keeping agent. The pinch of black pepper is a survival from the days when sweet and hot were not thought of as opposites.