Auntie Kay's Mincemeat Recipe

Continuing with the old fashioned Christmas stuff, I decided to make some mince pies. Rather than search the net for recipes this time though, I decided to pull out an old recipe book that was written by my Great Aunt for my Gran on her wedding day in 1940. My mom has it now, and it's a really fascinating little book, with recipes for everything from ketchup to cough syrup. There are two recipes in it for mincemeat; I chose the first one purely because it made a smaller batch. Here's the recipe as it appears in the handwritten cookbook:

That's right, no instructions, just a little shopping list. And "nutmeg" is used as a unit of measurement ;) I'll write it out all nice and modern, with the instructions that I improvised/stole from another cookbook (that cookbook, by the way, had a mincemeat recipe with actual meat in it, but I'm not brave enough to try that yet. Maybe next year.). I don't know if the instructions match the recipe, and I'm not entirely sure I ended up with what was intended, but all in all the pies I made from the mincemeat were pretty tasty...

Auntie Kay's Mincemeat Recipe

• 1 lb raisins
• 1 lb currants
• 1 lb suet
• 1 lb white sugar
• 1/4 lb mixed peel
• 2 nutmegs (I would suggest small ones)
• Juice and zest of 2 large lemons
• 3tbsp brandy (or however much you want to add, since the recipe doesn't specify ;) )

Melt suet in a large saucepan. Mix in the raisins, currants, sugar, peel and brandy. Grate the zest of the lemons into the pot and add their juice. Grate the nutmegs into the mixture. Bring to a low boil and simmer on low for about an hour.

So some people are probably thinking... suet? what's that? isn't it bird food? Well, it is now... but people used to eat it in all sorts of things. I thought I was pretty safe from culinary weirdness while making traditional Christmas goodies, but when you think about it, rendered beef fat in a confection is a bit odd by modern standards. And when what you end up with is this:

Um... yeah. A 3lb lump of beef fat. Not very appetizing. You can get it in nice clean little packets, already grated up for you, but in the spirit of doing things the old fashioned way (or the hard way, if you prefer) I got this at The Butcher Shoppe in Airdrie (I also found a goose there! Will be cooking that up for Christmas dinner!). I'd have bought a smaller piece, but this is all they had that didn't have birdseed in it ;) It looks marginally better when broken up...

Ok, not really. But it melts. The pre-grated stuff probably melts completely smooth, but there were some bits of membrane or something in mine that I had to pick out as it melted. Sadly I have no pictures for that because all the pictures I took of the pot on the stove are horribly blurry.

The other ingredients are much more common dessert fare, currants, peel, nutmeg, sugar... Sometimes peel is sold in north america as "mixed dried fruit" or "mixed peel", "citrus peel" "candied peel" etc. It usually comes in a little clear plastic tub, and it looks like this:

You could also use homemade candied citrus peel if you were really ambitious. I want to make some of that sometime too.

Also, I need to talk about the nutmeg for a moment. When I first read the recipe and saw "2 nutmegs" I thought it must mean two whole... well... nutmegs. The un-ground-up form of the spice. See below.

Yeah. Two of those (the one on the right is half of one that has been grated). But it didn't say anything about grating them, and I really did think that two whole nutmegs would overpower the whole recipe. Turns out I was wrong. I put in one and a half small nutmegs, grated up, and really the spice was still quite subtle. I think 2 would have been fine.

The end result was quite tasty, with the lemon and nutmeg making up a good portion of the flavor. There did seem to be a lot of suet separating out of the mixture as it cooled... I kind of avoided most of the greasiness by scooping out the cooked rasin/currant mixture and letting the melted suet drain off as I put it into tarts. I'm not sure if longer cooking would 'fix' the separating or not, or if it was intended - perhaps it acted like a wax seal if you were canning the mincemeat by rising to the top of the jar and solidifying.

I'll tease you now with pictures of the mini mincemeat tarts I made, though I don't have the pastry recipe ready for posting. Mom made the pastry at the same time as I was making the filling, so I didn't get a chance to take pictures. I will pick her brain for the recipe later.