Minced Pie of Beef

History

Both of these are mincemeat pies of the old meat-and-fruit kind: finely chopped meat, beef suet, apple, raisins, wine or cider and warm spice, sealed under a crust. The Foot Pie renders its meat from neat's feet — cattle feet soaked a week, simmered tender and chopped fine — whose long boiling yields the gelatin that helps the filling set. The Beef version chops boiled beef into six pounds of raw apple with a pound of suet, a quart of wine or rich sweet cider, mace, cinnamon, a nutmeg and two pounds of raisins.

For most of its recorded life the mince pie was a meat dish. The meats varied — beef, mutton, neat's tongue and others — bound with suet and made rich with dried fruit and spices, a way of keeping meat in an age before refrigeration. Sweetness came from honey or dried fruit before sugar was widely available.

Simmons's two pies sit squarely on the turn between savoury and sweet. They still carry real meat, yet the fruit is already winning: the beef mince packs six pounds of apple against four of meat, sweetened and kept by wine, cider and raisins rather than sugar. Her closing instruction — that a sealed pie can be reopened weeks later, the filling lifted out and refreshed with more wine and spice, the crust rewarmed like a hoe cake and served hot 'through the winter' — shows the old preserving logic of mincemeat still doing its work in a New England kitchen.

What the book does not tell us is when or why these pies were eaten. Simmons frames hers as keeping pies for the cold months rather than holiday fare. Nor does she say where her method came from; the pies speak only for themselves — a meat mincemeat caught in the act of becoming a sweet one.

Three things we could not stand behind: that brandy was commonly folded in by the eighteenth century, that cheap West Indian sugar drove the pie from savoury towards sweet in that same century, and the dish's association with Christmas across the English-speaking world. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 4 pound boiled beef
• 6 pound raw apple
• 1 pound beef suet
• 1 quart wine or rich sweet cyder
• 1 ounce mace
• cinnamon
• 1 nutmeg
• 2 pounds raisins
• paste No. 3

Instructions

1. Chop four pounds of boiled beef fine and salt it.
2. Chop six pounds of raw apple.
3. Combine with one pound of beef suet, one quart of wine or rich sweet cider, one ounce of mace, cinnamon, a nutmeg, and two pounds of raisins.
4. Bake in paste No. 3 for three fourths of an hour.