This fall I began a bit of a food research project about mincemeat. As a child in rural Maine, mincemeat was something which was made every fall when my dad harvested a deer. We’d typically have a pie made of it at either/both Thanksgiving and Christmas time. I didn’t realize when I moved away to college how darn hard it would be to get “real” mincemeat pie again.
The couple times I ordered it in a restaurant or tried to make it from “that stuff they sell in the store” and was BEYOND disappointing. It wasn’t until I moved to upstate New York and was hanging out with friends one fall that I had the problem explained to me.
You see mincemeat started out as a mixture of chopped dried or fresh fruit, spices, distilled spirits and beef suet, beef or venison. Over time the recipe has evolved to not include meat. It MAY include suet but butter, or shortening is more typical to make the recipe vegetarian/vegan. The jarred stuff in the store is completely meat-product free and thus has the wrong texture and taste compared to what I grew up with.
What my family made growing up contain venison scrap bits, diced apples, orange and lemons ground up, spices, and lots of raisins. In truth the process started with my grandmother Coombs pressure cooker and deer bones. She’d fill the scary beast with bones and pressure cook them until all the tasty bits of macerated meat would come off the bone. These bits would get combined with local apples (often from the crab apple tree in her yard or some neighbor’s heirloom tree), spices, raisins, a bit of ground up orange or lemon. The mixture got cooked down until it was mushy and well softened. We’d put it in jars and can them so that the mincemeat would keep for the winter (or MANY winters).
For the holidays my grandmother or dad would make a pie with the mixture. Sometimes on nasty snowy days dad would come in from plowing and shoveling and make mincemeat “turnovers”. I have a very strong sensory memory of the smell of apple, cinnamon, ginger goodness coming from the oven. And the tasty OMG, it is something I truly yearn for in the fall.
Unfortunately unless I get my hunting license I’m not sure I’ll ever quite duplicate the tasty from my childhood. Still, I’m thinking MAYBE if I can get my hands on some ground vension I might have a chance to get reasonably close.