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Mince Pie
Line a pie tin with pastry. Fill with mince meat. Cover with pastry. 1½ cups chopped beef (roast or steak) 2 cups chopped apple cup chopped suet 1⅓ cups sugar
This is a bare-bones mincemeat pie, and the text as printed has lost several fractions in the original typesetting. Read it as a proportion sketch rather than a formula.
- The missing fractionsThe printed text has lost at least one quantity: "cup chopped suet" has no number in front of it, and "1 cups sugar" has probably lost a fraction. Comparable mincemeat recipes of the period tend to use something like 1/2 cup suet and 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar to this much meat and apple. Treat the quantities as ambiguous and taste as you go.
- No oven givenA double-crust pie of this kind is usually baked hot to start, around 425F for about 15 minutes to set and brown the pastry, then reduced to about 350F for 25 to 30 minutes. The filling is already cooked meat, so the baking is about the crust and about melting the suet through the fruit.
- The beef is cooked, not raw"roast or steak" points to already-cooked meat, chopped fine. Using up cooked meat was one common route to mincemeat, though plenty of period versions called for beef boiled specially for it. Starting with raw beef risks a grainy, underdone filling in the time a pie crust takes.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and increasingly hard to find. It should be chopped or grated cold and stays in shreds until the oven melts it. Frozen grated butter is a common stand-in, though it gives a softer, less traditional filling.
- What the book leaves outNearly every mincemeat of this era carries spice, dried fruit and liquid — cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, raisins or currants, and cider, apple juice or brandy to moisten. Without some liquid this filling bakes dry, and without spice it tastes like sweetened beef.
- Let the filling standMix the mincemeat and refrigerate it at least a few hours, ideally overnight, before filling the shell. The sugar draws juice from the apple and the flavours settle; filling a crust with just-mixed mincemeat is one common cause of a bland, weeping pie.
- Vent the topCut steam slits or a few holes in the upper crust. A sealed double crust over a wet fruit-and-fat filling lifts away from the pie and splits at the rim.
- YieldThese quantities make roughly enough for one 9-inch pie. It is rich, and slices are generally cut small.
Mincemeat began as genuinely meaty: medieval and early modern English cooks packed pies with chopped beef or mutton, suet, dried fruit and spice, the sugar and spice serving as much to preserve as to flavour. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the meat quietly dropped out on both sides of the Atlantic, until "mincemeat" came to mean the fruit-and-suet jar sold at Christmas with no beef in it at all. This entry sits closer to the older form, giving a plain economical formula built on leftover roast — a sign of how long the beef-bearing version held on in American home kitchens.