Mince pies are confusing to anyone who isn’t British; they are full of ‘mincemeat’, yet they contain no minced meat – or any meat at all, for that matter. They used to, though, and these meaty mince pies are not as weird as they might sound.
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They have been eaten since the Middle Ages, when they were filled with the most expensive and exotic ingredients: plenty of meat, dried fruit, spices and sometimes alcohol. These pies, like much of the upper-class food of the Middle Ages, were influenced by the food of the Middle East and North Africa; there’s little difference between these pies and a tagine, for example. Mince pies such as these were cracked open at fancy feasts all year round.
The history of mince pies
Cookery books written in the era of the Stuarts provide us with many recipes for ‘minc’d pyes’. Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660) is one of those. The meat used is highly variable; you can choose from lamb or mutton, ox tongue or veal. There are mince pies made for fasting days made with carp, salmon, even sturgeon (once declared a 'royal fish', now on the brink of extinction), and there is one recipe where hard-boiled eggs are used in place of meat.
Importantly, May’s book doesn’t just give us recipes for fillings, but illustrations of what the pies looked like. Some were made into intricate shapes which, when laid out, formed a symmetrical pattern of pies similar to that of a Tudor garden, others were cylindrical or cube-shaped. Around the time May’s book was published, the Puritans, headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, identified these indulgent pies as Catholic and tried to stop them from being made at Christmastime.
By the 18th century, mincemeat fillings were exactly how we might expect them, with the inclusion of brandy, apples and dark-brown sugar. There was meat – the favourite by far being ox tongue – and suet, the crumbly fat found around the kidneys of a mammal, usually beef, but sometimes veal or mutton.
They were still expensive to make, but costs had dropped enough for the middle classes to be able to enjoy them. Some writers noticed that people needed to economise and came up with cheaper recipes, using the chopped meat extracted from boiled calves’ feet and even tripe. There are recipes too for mincemeat containing no meat (though plenty of suet), indicating perhaps that people were shifting away from tagine-like pies towards sweeter, boozier ones.
In the Victorian era, the amount of meat really began to fall and there was much more sugar. Many were still expensive to make; Charles Elmé Francatelli’s recipe for ‘mincemeat a la Royale’ (he was Queen Victoria’s chef) contained all of the ingredients you might expect plus roast sirloin of beef, ‘a proportionate weight of poached pears and preserved ginger’ and a triple threat of Christmas booze: brandy, rum and port. Amounts were vast: Alexis Soyer (a man often said to be the first bona fide celebrity chef) has one recipe that used, among other things, 640 pounds of dried fruit, 200 pounds of sugar, 350 pounds of suet and 72 bottles of brandy.
In the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management there are only two mincemeat recipes. Her standard mincemeat has a small proportion of ‘lean beef’ and her ‘excellent mincemeat’ has none at all. Taking a look at her recipes, we see the instruction ‘mince the beef and suet’, but also to ‘pare, core and mince the apples; mince [the] lemon peel’.
This does not mean that one had to pass all of these items through a mincing machine: they had yet to be invented. The term ‘mincing’ meant, until very recently, to chop well, so if you want to accurately recreate some historical or traditional mince pie fillings, you should be chopping all of your ingredients. Beeton’s mince pies were now small and ‘patty pan’-sized.
Modern mass-produced mince pies are very sweet compared to their ancestors, but you will find the old recipes really are the best, and I heartily recommend making meaty mince pies; their deliciousness cannot be bettered.
What is the Yorkshire Christmas pye?
The Yorkshire Christmas pye is a humungous pie, teeming with game and other meats. The huge pies were sent as gifts from Yorkshire landowners with plenty of land and plenty of game living on that land. They would be sent to friends residing in the cities, so they would have to travel quite a distance by horse and carriage. They were traditionally eaten on the Feast of Stephen, 26 December.
Chef to Queen Victoria, Charles Elmé Francatelli wrote of them: ‘Their substantial aspect renders them worthy of appearing on the side-table of those wealthy epicures who are want to keep up the good old English style, as this season of hospitality and good cheer.’
The first recipe to appear in print pops up in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). She instructs us first to ‘make a good Standing Crust, the Wall and Bottom be very thick; bone a Turkey, a Goose, a Fowl, a Partridge, and a Pigeon, season them all very well.’ Next, we must ‘[o]pen the Fowls all down the Back and bone them … lay them in the Crust, so as it will look only like a whole Turky [sic]; then have a Hare ready cased [and] jointed; season it, and lay it as close as you on one Side; on the other Side Woodcock, more Game, and what sort of wild Fowl you can get… put at least four Pounds of Butter into the Pye, then lay on your Lid … and let it be well baked. It must have a very hot oven, and will take at least four Hours.’
When it came to eating it, the crust was cracked open, the animals extracted and carved before being eaten with the spiced butter and jellied juices. The pastry for the pie required a bushel of flour – around 27 kilograms. I was once asked to recreate Hannah’s pie for a TV programme, and it was a complete disaster. The pie – which took me five days to construct – collapsed within minutes of entering the oven, slumping on to the glass door, spewing melted butter everywhere. What I didn’t know at the time was that a strip of metal would have been fastened around the pie, acting like a corset. Later, large, sculptural pie moulds were made from tinned copper to do this job most effectively.
An illustration exists of one of Queen Victoria’s Christmas pyes. It’s being carried into the dining room and is so big, four footmen are acting as pallbearers. Her chef’s recipe included four turkeys, a goose, two pheasants, four partridges, four woodcocks, 12 snipes, four grouse, four widgeons, a Yorkshire ham and two ox tongues. All of the birds were filled with a rich stuffing and French truffles. The cooked pie was then filled with aspic jelly.
However, the largest example of a Christmas pie so far unearthed was found by historian Ivan Day and comes from a grand house in the Lowther Valley, Lake District, 1763. It contained: ‘two Geese, four Ducks, two Turkeys, four fowls, one wild Goose, six wild Ducks, three Teals, two Starlings, 12 Partridges, 15 Woodcocks, two Guinea Cocks, three Snipes, six Plovers, three Water Hens, six Widgeons, one Curlew, 46 Yellow Hammers, 15 Sparrows, two Larks, two Chaffinches, three Thrushes, one Fieldfare, six Pigeons, four Blackbirds, 20 Rabbits, one Leg of Veal, Half a Ham, three Bushels of Flower, two Stone of Butter’ – the pie weighed 22 stone. That’s 140 kilograms. As Day quips, “I don’t suppose much birdsong was heard in the Lowther Valley for some months.”
Where did the Christmas pudding originate?
Like many Yuletide traditions in the UK, the Christmas pudding is a Victorian invention, a pimped-up version of the plainer plum pudding. It was paired, not with custard or brandy butter, but with roast beef, and it symbolised all that was great about Great Britain and its empire: the best home-grown beef combined with a pudding made from colonial imports: dried fruits, sugar, candied citrus and spices.
The first recipes for Christmas pudding appeared just a few years after the publication of A Christmas Carol. Tastes were changing and the regular plum pudding was enriched with extra fruit, sugar and booze. By the 20th century, it was sweet enough to migrate to the dessert course. The pudding was still plain by today’s standards, that is until the launch of the unctuous and very dark Empire Pudding by George VI in the 1930s with its 17 ingredients. It was a vain attempt to get the country behind a crumbling empire, but it did set a precedent for very boozy black-as-night Christmas puddings.
If your family finds modern Christmas puddings a bit much, please seek out a 19th-century recipe; you won’t be sorry.
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