I ask you the question that all youngsters ask at Christmas time,
does mincemeat actually have meat in it?
Well no, not today but it did like in this recipe from Victorian England for mincemeat pie.
So thank you to Wondrium for sponsoring this video as we make mincemeat with actual meat
this time on Tasting History.
So at the time that I'm filming this episode Tasting History is getting dangerously close
to hitting 1 million subscribers.
Wow!
So if you have already subscribed thank you so so much, and if
now is the time.
So there are so many recipes from mincemeat pie through the ages, that I really had
trouble deciding which kind I wanted to do. Modern mincemeat doesn't have meat in it so
that's not very historical but Medieval mincemeat almost only has meat in it and that just doesn't
really remind me of Christmas, so I finally decided on a Victorian mincemeat pie recipe from
Eliza Acton that has some meat.
"Mincemeat. (Author's receipt) To one pound of an unsalted ox tongue
or inside of roasted sirloin... add two pounds of fine stoned raisins, two of beef kidney suet,
two pounds and a half of currants... two of good apples, two and a half of fine lisbon sugar from half to a whole pound of candied peel...
the grated rinds of two large lemons, and two more boiled quite tender, and chopped up entirely,
with the exception of the pips, two small nutmegs, half an ounce of salt, a large teaspoonful of pounded mace,
rather more of ginger in powder, half a pint of brandy and as much good sherry or Madeira.
Mince these ingredients separately, and mix the others all well before the brandy and the wine are added."
So that is her recipe for mincemeat and it makes like 30 pounds of mincemeat so
I'm pairing it way way back. Also she has several ways of making them into pies,
some are covered and some are not. I'm going to go for uncovered because I like the look of them.
Now if you are a fan of the channel you might recognize the book that this recipe comes from
'Modern Cookery for Private Families' because it's where I got the recipe for last year's episode on figgy pudding.
Now obviously I cover a lot of Victorian Christmas food history here on the channel
but for some Victorian Christmas non-food history I turn to today's sponsor Wondrium.
What once was the Great Courses Plus has expanded its library to become Wondrium
where you can find thousands of educational and entertaining videos taught by experts in the field about everything
from travel to science, literature and of course Victorian Christmas history
in "The Surprising Origins of Christmas Traditions.'
I always have Wondrium playing while I'm cooking in the kitchen and today was no exception,
and while I was tinkering with this recipe I learned that
we send Christmas cards because in 1843 Sir Henry Cole was too busy to send the customary Christmas
letter to his family and friends. Instead he commissioned the artist John Callcott Horsley
to make an illustrated card being considered the first Christmas card.
Even better was that it caused an outcry from temperance advocates because it featured a mother giving her child a sip of wine.
So if you love learning stuff like this and so much more make sure to start your
free trial of Wondrium by visiting wondrium.com/tastinghistory
or by clicking the link in the description to get started, just like I'm about to get started on these mince pies.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: a half cup or 45 grams of ox tongue or roast sirloin.
I know which one I'm choosing.
A heaping half cup or 90 grams of raisins, 3/4 of a cup or 90 grams of beef suet,
that is the fat from around the kidneys of a cow and it's actually really wonderful and used in a lot of baking,
but it's kind of hard to find here in the US. You can get it online I'll put a link in the description to where you can get it
as well as a vegetarian version but you can also just use butter.
It's not exactly the same but it works.
1 cup or 120 grams of dried currants, 3/4 of a cup or 90 grams of apples,
1 heaping 1/2 cup or 115 grams of sugar, 3 tablespoons or 50 grams of candied peel,
1 teaspoon lemon zest, a half boiled lemon, though you'll need to boil a full lemon.
1 teaspoon of nutmeg, a half teaspoon of salt, an eighth teaspoon of mace, 3/4 of a teaspoon of ginger,
2 tablespoons of brandy, 2 tablespoons of a dark cherry
and then either short crust or rough puff pastry. She mentions both being used so either one will work just fine.
Also this might come as a shock but in this mincemeat recipe you'll need to have all of your fruit and meat
minced. I even cut my raisins in half just so they'd be about the same size as everything else.
So in a good size bowl mix the fruit and the beef, and then mix in the suet
and then I find it best to mix your spices, salt, lemon zest, and sugar separately
just so they'll coat everything more evenly when you add it to the meat and the fruit.
Then finally pour in the brandy and sherry and give it one last mix. Then cover the bowl and put it in the refrigerator
at least overnight but preferably up to a week, honestly you can actually keep this if you put it
into sterilized jars for over a year which is why she's making like a wheelbarrow full of mincemeat.
Once the meat has rested line a tart tin with the dough and then spoon in a bit of the mixture,
then pop the tray in an oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit 175 Celsius for about 15 minutes
or until the crust starts to brown. Now this recipe should make about two dozen pies
of mincedmeat a recipe which has changed quite a bit over the years.
The mincemeat pie is but one in a family of meat pies that gain popularity in Medieval Europe.
The mingling of meat and spices popped into pastry was all the rage with the upper crust who could afford
the crust, the meat, and the spices.
These early pies were probably something like the chewtes on Flessh Daye that I made a few months back.
Then at some point during the Middle Ages in a kitchen of some unnamed noble
a cook realized that if you add a bit of sugary fruit to the meat
it helps flavor the meat as well as preserve the meat.
That's the reason that even today you could eat a mincemeat pie from 1974 and probably be just fine.
So this mixture was a proto-mince meat but the pies tended to be massive
with about 90% being meat and 10% or even less being fruit,
mostly figs raisins and apples, and they were called shred or shrid pies because the meat was 'shrid'.
Then around the Tudor era the term changed to minced pies. A recipe from 1624 for six minced pies of an indifferent bigness
called for mutton loin and leg of veal and it included much more fruit than the recipes of previous centuries,
and these pies seem to be most popular during the winter months which makes sense
because that was the time when fresh meat and fresh fruit were harder to come by,
and so the association with Christmas was inevitable. In his collection of poems on Christmas traditions
the 17th century english poet Robert Herrick wrote "Drink now the strong beer, cut the white loaf here,
the while the meat is a shredding for the rare mince pie and the plum standing by,
to fill the paste that's a kneading."
That poem has a weird cadence and I couldn't figure out how to read it
to make it work but there it is.
And he warned that these pies were so good that they needed to be kept under a watchful eye lest they be purloined.
"Come, guard this night the Christmas pie, that the thief, though ne'er so sly, with his flesh hooks don't come nigh to catch it."
Unfortunately as coveted as they were the mince pie was about to hit some hard times brought on
by some hard people, the Puritans.
Oliver Cromwell and his cronies deemed everything about Christmas as popish folderol
and in 1644 Parliament banned all Christmas celebrations
accusing them of "giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights"
which they do, God bless them.
Well in this blanket ban of all things carnal of course meat pies were at the top of the list.
Now there is an urban myth that says that these 17th century bans on mince pie
were never actually lifted and to this day if you are caught eating mince pie on Christmas
the magistrate has every right to throw you in the clink.
This is of course not true because there was never actually any ban that called out mince pies specifically
and even if there had been, of course it has been repealed, but the myth persists.
And it's perhaps because the writers of the time used mince pies specifically
to ridicule the Puritans ability to linkabsolutely anything to Catholic papism.
"Christ-mass? Give me my beads; the word implies a plot by its ingredients beef and pies.
The cloyster'd steaks with salt and pepper lye
like nuns with patches and a monastery. Prophaneuess in a conclave? Nay, much more, Idolatrie in crust!
Babylon's whore..."
I do clutch my pearls.
Now one reason that some people think mince pies might have been so offensive to the Puritans
was that in addition to being shaped like stars or castles or fleur-de-lis
some claim at Christmas the pies would have a decoration on top in the shape of baby Jesus which was a Puritanical no-no.
Though it's probably more likely that this was actually an invention of later centuries.
So who knows why the Puritans hated them so much. Now while the shape and decoration of a mince pie may
seem inconsequential to us in the 17th century it was a matter of life and death.
In 'The Exaltation of Christmas Pye' The author tells of a man who found mince pies only safe to eat
when shaped like little boats "that they might swim down his gullet the easier and indeed he was a mighty enemy
to four cornered pies for he said they were used to stick in his throat."
Also important was to eat them at the right temperature. "...My advice my beloved to you is that you eat them cold.
For I have heard of a bridegroom that was killed before he could lie with his bride
for adventuring to shovel hot minced pie down his throat for a wager."
I find that completely believable.
Now as time went on the mince meat dwindled and minced fruit kind of took over as the pie
until the 18th century when the only meat that was used was a little bit of usually cow tongue or calves tongue or
whatever meat you had lying around but the danger of eating them never fully subsided.
In fact it just got worse.
Mind you in England and here in the US mince pies remained popular
despite their ever blackening reputation.
In 1860 a Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote that mince pie is
"very white and indigestible upon the top, very moist and indigestible at the bottom,
with untold horrors in between."
And the 'Woman's Home Companion' declared
"Positively no stomach can digest mince pie without injury,
and no intelligent woman in these enlightened days serves it to her family."
They were considered so indigestible that an article from 1899 suggests that eaters of mince pie
first ingest capsules of "sand from the shores of Lake Michigan so they can digest food as chickens do."
Jr: Mom I don't feel well. :(
Mama Miller: Well did you eat your sand today?
I didn't think so.
They obtained such a reputation that in the 1890s the San Francisco Chronicle felt the need to
publish a recipe for "Harmless Mince Pies: they are said to be hygienic and safe to eat."
And if you ever read any recipe that opens with they're said to be safe to eat, make something else.
Now a food that causes indigestion while inconvenient has never really hindered its popularity,
I mean I eat Chipotle all the time.
But what if that food was deadly?
One story from 1872 claims that a Michigan boy of only three years old died after receiving burns
from a mince pie that his mother had taken out of the oven. Supposedly she had failed to vent the pie properly and it exploded.
Now I do question the veracity of that story but one story that did happen involves mince pie
and murder.
Chicago 1907, a young wife has been murdered shot in the head by her husband one Albert Allen.
Was it self-defense, a lover spat or was it mince meat madness?
"It was this way. I ate three pieces of mince pie at 11 o'clock and got to dreaming that I was shaking dice.
The other fella was cheating and I tried to shoot his fingers off.
When I awoke, I was holding the pistol in my hand
and my wife was shot."
She had it coming she had it coming.
Sorry I couldn't resist.
What's crazy is that this indigestible deadly pie was the most popular pie both in England and here in the US.
In fact it was the pie that was sent during WWI to US doughboys on the front to remind them of home,
and it became really popular during Prohibition because there was a loophole that allowed
alcohol into some canned foods and canned mincemeat at the time had a 14.1% alcohol content
but with the repeal of Prohibition and as apple pie became the symbol for American patriotism
all talk of mincemeat pies retreated to British shores and YouTube channels about food history.
So once your pies are baked you can take them out of the oven and let them cool. Now you can eat them warm
despite the 17th century warnings against it. You can eat them warm but you can also eat them at room temperature.
I actually prefer that and I bedight mine with a little powdered sugar for effect,
and here we are Victorian mince pies. They look so harmless, they smell good too.
Let's have a bite.
Hm!
This is so much better than the ones that you get today in the store.
They're so often today just like sickly sweet but this- it's sweet you know it's a dessert but
it's more fruity and
the textures are wonderful. It's not really mushy, everything is soft but everything is
very individual. There is no goop to it.
Also I love the lemon that is really what distinguishes it from
a modern mince pie. I think it's the boiled lemon, maybe the lemon zest but
there is certainly that that citrusy flavor without the tartness without the sour-
the sour quality it's it's just bright and really, really quite nice.
What's interesting is that so mostly I get like the raisins and the currants and the apple
and then at the very, very end you get that kind of meaty- there you- there is meat in it but it's very,
very slight and I don't mind it at all.
Because of the spices we used it really does have that Christmas feel but it's also different than what you usually have at Christmas.
So really all I have left to do is take a cue from little Jack Horner who sat in his corner
eating his Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said
what a good boy am I.
That kid had no problem with self-esteem.
So thank you again to Wondrium. Make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and subscribe if you haven't.
I'd love to get to a million by Christmas because why not! :)
And I will see you next time on Tasting History.
*CHOMP*