Minced Pies, A Foot Pie

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, made with meat long before it took its present sweet form. The meats varied — beef, mutton, neat's tongue and others — bound with suet and made rich with dried fruit and spices, a way of preserving meat in an age before refrigeration. Sweetness came from honey or dried fruit before sugar was widely available, and by the eighteenth century distilled spirits such as brandy were often folded in. That same century cheap West Indian sugar pushed the pie more sweet than savoury, and across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meat thinned out of the recipe until, for many cooks, only the suet remained.

Simmons's two pies sit squarely on that turn. 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. The mince pie is tied to Christmas across much of the English-speaking world, but Simmons frames hers as keeping pies for the cold months rather than holiday fare, and the record leaves the timing of that festive association uncertain. 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.

Ingredients

• neat's feet
• 4 pound minced meat
• 1 pound beef suet
• 4 pound raw apple
• salt
• 1 quart wine
• 2 pound stoned raisins
• 1 ounce cinnamon
• 1 ounce mace
• sweetener
• paste No. 3

Instructions

1. Scald neat's feet and clean them well; grass fed are best.
2. Put them into a large vessel of cold water, changing the water daily for a week.
3. Boil the feet till tender and take away the bones.
4. When cold, chop fine.
5. To every four pounds of minced meat, add one pound of beef suet, four pounds of raw apple, and a little salt, and chop all together very fine.
6. Add one quart of wine, two pounds of stoned raisins, one ounce of cinnamon, and one ounce of mace, and sweeten to your taste.
7. Make use of paste No. 3 and bake three quarters of an hour.
8. Weeks later, when needed, carefully raise the top crust and collect the meat into a basin with a round-edged spoon.
9. Warm the meat with additional wine and spices to taste.
10. Warm the crust like a hoe cake, put it carefully back together, and serve up.