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:

Visions of Sugar Plums?

So I was thinking the other day that even though I've heard about sugar plums every Christmas, I'd never actually seen, let alone eaten, one. After doing a little hunting around for recipes, thinking I was looking around for some way to preserve fruit, I found out that the visions of sugar plums dancing in my head were all wrong!

Turns out, they aren't plums at all, but rather a confection made from dried fruits and roasted nuts and/or spices combined with citrus peel and honey, formed into balls and rolled in powdered sugar. The word 'plum' was used in times past to describe several different round, sweet fruits or confections rather than the specific type of fruit we use the term for today. I decided to try making some with a Sugar plum recipe I found at Saveur to experience the real thing first hand. Here are the results:

Orange Clove Pomanders

Ok, I promise I will eventually get to the arcane, obscure and occult (sometimes literally) recipes of Ancient Rome and Iron Age Britain and such at some point. Trust me, it will get weird around here. But for now, I shall stick to the merely quaint and antiquated prettiness of the Victorian period.

Orange Clove Pomanders are an old idea, they make pretty decorations in both period and modern homes, and are pleasant, all natural air fresheners. They're also a simple, if time consuming, craft that can be done while watching TV. Kids would be perfectly safe doing it, but young ones might get bored or have sore fingers before the oranges are completely covered with cloves.