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Excellent Lemon Mincemeat
1/2 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 2 large lemons 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 4 apples ½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1/4 lb. chopped candied lemon peel 1 lb. currants ½ teaspoonful powdered allspice 1/4 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1 teaspoonful salt 1¾ cupfuls sugar ½ cupful seeded raisins ½ cupful chopped nut meats Extract juice from lemons and remove pips. Now put lemons into saucepan, cover with cold water, and boil until lemon feels quite tender.
A meatless, suetless mincemeat built on boiled whole lemons. Note that the text as printed in the book breaks off after the lemons are boiled tender — the mixing, cooking and potting steps are missing, so treat what follows as the shape of the method rather than a complete set of instructions.
- The hinge: boil the lemons wholeJuice the lemons, pick out the pips, then simmer the emptied shells in plenty of water until a skewer goes through the peel with no resistance; the book gives no time, and it will take a good while. Underboiled peel stays leathery and bitter and no amount of standing in sugar will fix it. Presumably the softened shells are then chopped or minced fine and the reserved juice goes back into the mixture, though the text stops before saying so.
- What Crisco is doing hereIt stands in for the beef suet of traditional mincemeat, giving richness and body without animal fat. Half a cup of any solid vegetable shortening works the same way; butter will do at the cost of a shorter keeping life.
- Sugar quantityThe raisins, nut meats and nutmeg now read as printed: half a cupful, half a cupful and half a teaspoonful. "13/4 cupfuls sugar" is 1 3/4 cupfuls. Scale the spices to taste and start low.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" here means the seeds have been taken out, as opposed to the seeded-in raisins also on sale; modern seedless raisins go straight in. Currants are the small dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants.
- Candied lemon peelA quarter pound is about 3/4 cup chopped. Buy whole candied peel and chop it yourself if you can; the pre-diced supermarket kind is often mostly sugar syrup and glucose.
- Keeping itWith no suet, no spirits and no processing instructions given, this is a fresh mincemeat. Pack it into clean jars, refrigerate, and use within two or three weeks. Do not attempt to shelf-store it on the strength of this text — use a current tested recipe if you want to can mincemeat.
- YieldThe book gives no yield, and the truncated text gives no way to work one out. It improves after two or three days in the cold as the spices settle into the fruit.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a promotional cookbook for a product launched two years earlier: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white solid fat that behaved like lard but came from a plant. Mincemeat had by this date largely shed its actual minced meat, but it still depended on beef suet, which put it out of reach of vegetarians and of kosher households cooking a dairy meal — the kosher market at least was one Crisco's advertising courted openly. Meatless lemon mincemeats were already known in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, where boiled lemon shells supplied the sharp, faintly bitter backbone that citrus-and-dried-fruit mixtures need. Setting one in shortening rather than suet was the small, pointed argument the whole book was making.