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Vegetarian (Change water at least twice)
Change water at least twice, drain and pound peel to a paste, add apples, cored, peeled and chopped, lemon peel, Crisco, currants, raisins, salt, spices, lemon juice, nut meats, and sugar. Put into a jar and cover. This mincemeat is excellent for pies and tartlets.
Sufficient for four pies.
This is the second half of a vegetarian mincemeat: the page picks up mid-method, after the citrus peel has been boiled. Quantities are on the missing portion, so treat what follows as technique rather than a formula.
- The missing head of the recipeThe instruction to "change water at least twice" refers to boiling citrus peel through several changes of water to draw out bitterness. The page does not say which peel; lemon peel is listed separately among the later additions. Nothing here gives weights for the fruit, sugar or Crisco, and inventing them would be guesswork.
- Why the water is changedCitrus pith holds bitter compounds that leach out in hot water. Two or three changes, each brought back to a boil, leaves the peel soft enough to pound and mild enough to eat in quantity. Skipping it gives a mincemeat that tastes medicinal.
- Pounding to a pasteA mortar was the tool of the day. A food processor does the same job in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the peel turns to a wet purée and the mincemeat loses its texture.
- Crisco stands in for suetShredded beef suet was the traditional binder and keeper in mincemeat. Crisco, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, is what makes this version vegetarian. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way; butter will work but softens the set and shortens the keeping.
- Nut meatsPeriod shorthand for shelled nut kernels. Walnuts or almonds are the usual choice here; chop them rather than grinding.
- No alcohol, so no keepingNo alcohol in what survives here -- Classic mincemeat relies on brandy or sherry plus suet to sit for weeks. No spirits appear in the portion printed on this page, and nothing in it is cooked after the peel, though the missing head may name ingredients we cannot see. On the evidence available, keep the jar refrigerated and use it within a few days rather than storing it at room temperature as the original implies.
- YieldThe original states enough for four pies, which suggests a batch in the region of six to eight cups of filling.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a promotional cookbook built around a then-new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a solid white shortening. Much of the book's argument is substitution, and mincemeat is one of its better cases. Mincemeat had for centuries been a genuinely meaty preserve, chopped beef or tongue with suet, dried fruit, spice and spirits, and by the nineteenth century many recipes had reduced or dropped the meat while the suet stayed on as fat and preservative, though frankly meaty versions persisted alongside them. That left the dish off-limits to vegetarians and, as Crisco's marketing pointedly noted elsewhere, to kosher households cooking a dessert alongside meat. Replacing suet with a vegetable fat solved both at once. The boiled peel that opens this fragment is much older than the shortening.