Home › The World's Kitchen › Mince Meat for Pie
Mince Meat for Pie
Pour into a large saucepan six quarts cold water and place in it nine pounds lean, raw rump of beef; put the saucepan on the fire, and when it comes to a boil thoroughly skim the scum from the surface and then allow it to boil for two hours. Remove the pan from the fire, lay it on a table, then with a fork take up the beef, lay it on a dish and let thoroughly cool off. Strain the broth through a sieve into another saucepan. Have three pounds of fresh beef suet, carefully remove all the sinews and then add it to the broth; place the saucepan on the fire and let boil until the suet is thoroughly dissolved, which will take about five minutes; add two pounds of well-stoned and finely chopped Malaga raisins and let the whole boil for five minutes; then add twenty fine, sound, medium-sized, peeled, cored and finely chopped apples and let cook again for five minutes. Remove the pan from the fire, transfer the contents into a vessel and let thoroughly cool off.
Chop the beef up very fine, then place it in a vessel, adding three-quarters of a pound finely chopped-up candied citron, pouring over it half pint good brandy, and let soak for six hours. Boil in a saucepan for one minute two quarts good cider, then lay it aside to cool off. Now transfer the contents of the two vessels to a large saucepan, adding one pound powdered sugar, one pound well-cleaned currants, half pint molasses and the cooled-off cider, and with the wooden spoon mix the whole well together for three minutes. Season with three ounces salt and quarter of an ounce black pepper. Place the saucepan on the fire, stir at the bottom with the wooden spoon until it is thoroughly heated, but do not allow it to boil. Remove it from the fire, transfer the whole into a vessel and let it thoroughly cool off. Then grate in the rind of four fine, medium-sized, sound lemons, squeezing in the juice also and adding half ounce ground cloves, half ounce ground cinnamon, half ounce ground allspice, half ounce grated nutmeg and half pint good brandy. Mix the whole well together for five minutes. Then transfer it into a large stone jar, tightly cover and lay in a cool place. The above preparation will keep in perfect condition for any length of time, even as long as six months. N. B. Nowadays excellent mincemeat is sold by all responsible grocers, and should it prove somewhat difficult to prepare it in your own house it can be obtained at said grocers.
This is a full barrel-sized batch of old-style meat mincemeat, and the storage instruction at the end is the part that has not survived modern food safety practice. The notes below explain the problem and decode the period measures.
- Why it fails: unsealed meat held for monthsThe finished mixture is cooked beef, suet and broth in a covered stone crock kept in a "cool place" for up to six months. A moist, low-acid meat mixture held anaerobically at cellar temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which produces toxin without any smell or visible spoilage. Nothing here reaches or holds a temperature that would destroy spores.
- The final heating is deliberately below boilingThe recipe says to heat the mixture through "but do not allow it to boil," then cool it and jar it. That step pasteurises nothing and does not sterilise the jar. The cider is boiled for one minute and then cooled separately, so it adds no heat to the finished mass either.
- Not enough acid, sugar or alcohol to preserveTraditional keeping mincemeats relied on very high sugar and spirit against a small proportion of meat. Here nine pounds of beef and three pounds of suet are set against one pound of sugar, one pint of brandy and two quarts of cider spread through several gallons of mixture. The preservative concentration is far too dilute to hold a meat product.
- Salt is seasoning, not a cureThree ounces of salt in a batch of this size is well under one percent by weight. That is a seasoning level, not a curing level, and it contributes nothing to shelf stability.
- If you want mincemeatUse a current tested recipe. Meat mincemeats today are either pressure-canned to a published process or frozen; fruit-only mincemeats are the usual home version. Do not adapt the timings above.
- Reading the measuresA half pint is one cup. "Powdered sugar" in this period usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Currants are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants.
- Ingredients that have shiftedMalaga raisins were large muscat raisins sold with the seeds in, hence the instruction to stone them; ordinary seedless raisins need no such work. Fresh beef suet from the kidney area now has to be ordered from a butcher, and candied citron appears mainly around the winter holidays.
- ScaleThe original produces several gallons, enough for a dozen or more large pies. Nothing in the text warns the reader of this, and the author's closing note about buying mincemeat from the grocer suggests he knew the batch was daunting.
Mince pie began as a genuine meat dish: medieval and early modern English cooks baked chopped mutton or beef with dried fruit, spice and suet, the sugar and spice acting as much to preserve and perfume as to sweeten. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meat shrank and the fruit grew, until by the twentieth century most English mincemeat contained only suet, and today often not even that. This version, from a book compiled in the era of the great American hotel kitchens, sits at the midpoint: the beef is still there in quantity, but so are apples, raisins, currants, citron, cider, molasses and brandy. The closing note is the most revealing line on the page. Commercially packaged mincemeat, sold in condensed cakes and jars, had become a staple of American groceries by the late nineteenth century, and here the author effectively concedes the domestic cook may as well buy it.