“Of an indifferent bigness” sounds like it ought to be a Shakesperean insult.
Thanks. Yes, you are correct; my Grandmother made her mince pies using beef suet.
She also made Christmas cakes (to our American friends, fruitcakes) and she started making her annual one in October. They take a long time to age, especially as Grandma used plenty of brandy, which had to soak through the rest of the cake.
Christmas at Grandma’s was a delight. Cocktails before dinner, wine with dinner, liqueurs after dinner, and her boozy fruitcake. Thankfully, we always had a designated driver to get us home.
I had the same thought.
Or perhaps something former President Bush II might have said. Although had he said it, you could have heard the interesting spelling “biggnesse” as well.
I sort of want to adopt the phrase into my usual vocabulary, spelling and all; I just need to figure out where it’d best fit. Besides as an implied insult to men.
That is definitely the hand version of the tool used in American to make “ground beef”.
And anyway, @Mighty_Mouse is actually an authority on this subject.
As far as that website goes, I was mainly going by this part:
Minced meat is meat that has been very finely chopped.
As far as my general belief that minced beef is a different thing than ground beef, I was going by my memory of my grandmother’s mincemeat. It appears that these days, for all intents and purposes, ground beef and minced meat are one and the same. Meata culpa.
My father had that exact type of tool growing up for grinding beef (and other items like vegetables). We call it a “manual meat grinder” or “hand grinder.” (Not for grinding hands, but a tool you use to grind by hand 
)
The smaller counter-top powered versions of those have certainly devoured a fingertip or two over the years. The bigger industrial ones? Shudder.
Also, i wanted to say this seems to be one of the rare cases where the American version of a culinary term is broader than the UK version. In addition to buying ground beef made in a machine that’s the big motorized version of that one, i also buy “stone ground corn meal”, which is theoretically ground between millstones, the image you are invoking there.
When I went to make a mincemeat pie, what I recall is that it called for beef suet (a sort of beef fat), but that was the only meat-adjacent ingredient in the whole thing, other than whatever was in the crust.
As far as the ground/minced debate goes, I’m guessing that it changed when meat grinders were invented, and that the usage in the UK was already entrenched enough to encompass the products of the grinders, but in the US it took a different name for whatever reason.
My mother’s was used to grind ham for ham salad.
What vegetables did your father grind?
Onions, beets, carrots, and tomatoes is what I remember.
What were ground vegetables used in?
Well, tomatoes for sauce or anywhere you’d want liquid tomatoes. Onions usually put in meat for meat loaf or little sausages. I think he did the same with carrots, in the meatloaf. I can’t remember what he did with the beets, but I distinctly remember it. You could also use it for a beet dip, I would think. There’s a hundred things you can do with ground vegetables.
Way back when I was a kid, we were doing a “historical foods” thing in school, and I made mincmeat cookies using a box of mince that came from who-knows-where. I knew that it was mostly dried fruit, but sometimes with beef suet, and I was curious about what kind was in the box I had, so I checked the ingredients. Which, helpfully, listed “Mince”.
As to those countertop hand-cranked grinders, they’re common in households in the culture I come from, mostly for processing venison. But my mom’s mostly gets used for green tomato relish.
This is how my grandmothers and mother made mincemeat at Christmas. I still do.
« My mincemeat includes meat! »
(To paraphrase an old Canadian political slogan.)
Recipe available on request.
I have an attachment to my mixer that does the same thing. I used it exactly once, to turn a beef heart into ground beef to make keema. I thought it would be fun to try heart. My husband was grossed out, but agreed to eat it if i hid its origin, so he didn’t have to think about it.
It was delicious, but enough work that I probably won’t do it again. And my husband ate it, but somewhat reluctantly, because he know it was heart in the dish. (He didn’t inject to the flavor or texture, just that he knew it had been a heart.)
I have no idea why i own that attachment. Maybe it came with the mixer or something.
When one of my aunts had newly married my uncle, they were eating at Grandma’s house, and she was serving heart. My uncle asked what it was, and knowing that he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the toolbox, Grandma answered “Cardiac steak”. He never caught on.
I’m not sure why anyone would be averse to eating heart, though. It’s a muscle. It’s made of meat. It’s not even from a gross part of the body, like the intestines or something.
Too much iron.
I’ll eat heart, but you seriously can’t imagine why someone might be squeamish about eating actual heart? It doesn’t matter what it’s made from, it’s a goddamned heart!
As opposed to a goddamned leg, or a goddamn breast? No, I seriously don’t get it.