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Mince Pies (Six pounds of lean fresh beef)
Six pounds of lean fresh beef boiled tender, when cold, chopped fine, a pound of beef suet chopped fine, five pounds of apples chopped, two pounds of raisins, (seeded), two pounds currants, half a pound of citron, two tablespoons of cinnamon, one of grated nutmeg, one tablespoon of cloves, one tablespoon of allspice, one tablespoon of salt, three pounds of brown sugar, a quart of wine, pint of brandy, and the liquor the meat is boiled in. Keep in a stone jar tied over with a double paper. It should be made, at least, the day before it is used, and when you make pies add a little more wine to what you take out for the pies, and more chopped apples.
This is a full-crock mincemeat of the older type, with real beef in it, meant to be laid down in quantity and drawn on through the winter. Everything here scales down cleanly by half or quarter.
- YieldAs written this comes to twenty pounds or more of mincemeat, enough for something on the order of ten to a dozen nine-inch double-crust pies. A quarter batch is more realistic for a modern household and loses nothing.
- Storage is the one thing to changeA stone jar tied over with double paper, kept in a cold pantry, was the period's answer to preservation; the sugar, wine and brandy do real work, but cooked beef held at room temperature is not something to attempt now. Pack it into jars and refrigerate for a few weeks, or freeze in pie-sized portions for a year.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape sold in the baking aisle, not fresh red or black currants. Two pounds is correct for the dried fruit.
- Raisins, seededNineteenth-century raisins had seeds and had to be slit and picked over. Modern seedless raisins go straight in; chop them coarsely if you want the texture of the original.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard kidney fat and is what gives mincemeat its body. Ask a butcher, or use packaged shredded suet. Chill it hard before chopping, or grate it frozen.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold with the glace fruit at holiday time. If you cannot find it, candied orange and lemon peel in equal measure is the usual substitute.
- The cooking liquorAdd the beef broth a ladle at a time rather than all at once. You want the mixture moist and glossy, not soupy; too much liquid and the pies weep through the bottom crust.
- ApplesFive pounds is about fifteen medium apples. Use a firm tart variety that holds its shape, and note that the recipe asks for more fresh chopped apple at the moment of filling the pies, which is what keeps a long-stored mincemeat from tasting flat.
- SpicesTablespoons of ground cloves and allspice read as extreme by modern standards but are in scale with twenty pounds of filling. Grind them fresh if you can; pre-ground cloves in particular fade quickly.
- AssemblingRoughly a quart of mincemeat per nine-inch pie. The recipe gives no oven directions; bake as you would any double-crust fruit pie, hot at first to set the crust, then moderate until the top browns.
Mincemeat began as literal minced meat: medieval and early modern English cooks preserved chopped beef, mutton or tongue with dried fruit, sugar and spice, the sweetness and the alcohol doing the work of a refrigerator. Through the nineteenth century the meat quietly retreated, first to suet alone and eventually to nothing at all, and a recipe like this one, with six pounds of boiled lean beef against five pounds of apples, sits at the point where the old form was still the normal form. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by local women and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children. The mincemeat was to be kept in a stone jar under a double paper cover, rather than sealed.