Challenge #2: BEST Traditional Mincemeat - not for vegans
In my last post, I talked about taking pressure off yourself to save your own sanity during the holidays. It just occurred to me that I may be a bit of a hypocrite as this time, I have probably created the most involved and expensive baking project to date. I present to you traditional mincemeat pies.
Why do I use the word traditional, you ask? Since the Crusades, mince pies have actually included meat until being phased out of the recipe during the Victorian era. The modern version without meat remains a Christmas staple in the United Kingdom. The reason they didn’t quite get the same iconic seasonal status here in the United States is because we were colonized by Puritans who hated Christmas and anything fun.
The first step in this three-step process was making candied citrus peel. Some of the ingredients for the pies were hard to come by, and as no grocery store here carried these, I followed the suggestion in the recipe to make your own. Each step is simple but requires time. To make these, boil them repeatedly in water and then in sugar water to make them sweet and translucent. It also creates a citrus simple syrup that I have no clue what to do with. If I drank cocktails, I could use it to sweeten a vodka and soda using a candied orange peel for garnish, but I usually stick with beer or wine for casual drinking.
The peels had to stay out and dry for a few days before adding them to the mincemeat filling. They were actually kind of tasty and made a nice holiday treat.
The filling was the most expensive part. I had to use various raisins and currents. Believe it or not, currents are not easily found in Little Rock, Arkansas. So, I had to order them from Amazon. I also had to find an alternative to suet. Had I ordered that from Amazon, I would not have gotten it until January. The closest thing I found in the United States was on a website that specializes in 18th Century cooking, but it cost $22, and I was already pushing my budget. Cheap Kroger brand beef tallow it is.
The ingredients are cooked in a pot for two hours. It was like a weird beef stew and tasted interesting, but good. All of the spices made my apartment smell like Christmas. After it was done, it had to be jarred. I had read that typically, the mincemeat filling is made months in advance and stored in the refrigerator. I don’t have that kind of time, so the filling had only a few days for the flavors to develop.
Interesting side note, the Quakers called mincemeat pies “an Invention of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon” as the recipe originated from the Middle East.
As I stated before, this recipe was very involved and was a three-step process that took me a week to complete. I began to get a bit overwhelmed while making these. Towards the end, I kept finding myself procrastinating the final stage: making the pies themselves. On the final night, I heard my dad’s voice, as I usually do when I put things off.
“Get on with it. You have a job to do.”
The last step was making the crust. It was a very simple pie crust and I made them into little tarts with stars on top which made them look cute. I used as much of the filling as I could and ran out of dough towards the end. They turned out well. The beef was a little overcooked but tasted good.
It was an experience, and I’m glad I did it, but I probably won’t be making them again except for the citrus peels. It made me think of the elaborate cakes and treats that we make every year, and for what? To impress people? I’m not trying to impress anyone. I just wanted to make something I had never made before.
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