Okay, please don’t blame me for this question. This comes from the twisted mind of my teenager, Kid CaptMurdock, who swears that on the Discovery Channel, he saw a show about mincemeat pie, and swears that the main ingredient of that is mouse. :eek:
Kids. What are gonna do? :smack:
Please refute this canard ASAP. Thanks.
Here is a recipe for mincemeat. It contains no meat at all, just chopped up apples, raisins and such.
Haj
Sorry, I posted way too fast.
Mincemeat also contains BEEF suet.
Haj
Beef suet and/or pork. I suppose if these ingredients are not readily available, a couple of mice would do.
Meat is meat. I don’t care, I like pie.
ONe of my cookbooks suggest that mincemeats were originally a method to preserve meat which didn’t involve the usual smoking or drying.
No, no, no, no, no. Sheesh.
It’s rat.
Actually, there are two traditional ways to go at it. The first version, the one I’m most familiar with, is with any kind of cooked beef, usually pot roast-type meat or stewing beef, cooked and chopped up very fine, and then mixed with sugar and raisins and apples and candied orange peel and stuff like that, and spices. Then after it’s cooled off, you fill up a piecrust with it. What you end up with tastes more like a raisin pie than anything else–the meat isn’t that obvious.
There are meat versions out there that use pork, hamburger, whatever kind of meat you want.
For the second version, which seems to be the traditional British version, you eliminate the actual meat and just use pure beef suet (that’s the white solid fat you put in bird feeders). Add apples, raisins, sugar, spices, etc. I have never had this version so I don’t know what it tastes like, but since it’s equal parts suet and sugar, it’s probably extremely rich and tastes like apples and raisins and spices. Beef suet is a very neutral-flavored fat.
And since the thing is sometimes known simply as “mince” or “mince pie”, I’m guessing that Kid CaptMurdock misheard “mince” as “mouse”.
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/9522/mincemeat.html
http://www.greenchronicle.com/regional_recipes/east_anglian_mincemeat.htm
I think your kid might have misheard “mice” for “mince”.
Australians are the largest per capita consumers of meatpies in the world. Meatpies are to us what hotdogs are to Americans or chips to the Brits (though we eat those too).
The world’s largest meatpie factory is the Four’n Twenty factory here in Melbourne, turning out more than 50,000 pies per hour. I think they would need alot of mice to keep up with demand. I can’t recall seeing the world’s biggest mouse farm around here anywhere.
A regular commercially made meat pie contains minced beef, herbs, stock, etc all wrapped in puff pastry. There are also chicken and other types of pies.
Mouse parts would constitute a major food standards breach with pretty heavy penalties attached.
Hajario We’d call that a mince pie
I have seen an old recipe for mincemeat made from moose meat, not mouse meat. It was supposed to be a traditional New England recipe. I’ve had moose in the front yard, but I’ve never had moose in mincemeat. When I whipped up a batch last week, I used beef.
I have a recipe that calls for veal neck (boiled for some time) and potatoes. It said that the resulte amount would depend on the size of the neck and how thin you peel the potatoes.
I believe that here in Australia ‘meat’ pies must contain a minimum of 30% meat. God knows what the rest is.
-Oli
If you’re talking about the mince pies which become available at Christmas, they are - indeed - made from fruit mince, and not meat (although for come strange reason, the labelling on some brands of them does read mincemeat; if they were actually MEAT it would say mincED meat).
The secret to making good meat-based mince pies (what you called ground beef in the US, we call mince here), is slow cooking of the meat, and a sprinkle of nutmeg (I know that sounds weird, but trust me), and using mince which has a little bit of fat in it )it’s the one time you don’t want to use extra-premium mince).
I make kick-ass normal, chicken, and steak and kidney pies - and I make a pretty mean sherpherd’s pie too.
Theoretically, you could even have vegetarian “mincemeat” because in English the word meat originally meant simply ‘food’ without necessarily implying ‘pieces of dead animals’. As in sweetmeat, which is another word for candy or confection, no animals involved. And the old phrase meat and drink which just meant ‘food and drink’.
Meat came from Old English mete ‘item of food’, from Proto-Germanic *matiz, from Proto-Indo-European *mad- ‘moist, wet’ (also referring to various qualities of food — presumably boiled food: soup, stew, porridge, and the like).
In English, what was originally ‘food’ in general became semantically specialized to mean only animal flesh. In Semitic, there was a similar development in a root that originally meant ‘food’ and eventually came to mean ‘meat’ (i.e., animal flesh) and thence even ‘slaughter’. The Semitic root LHM.
Orginally, this root LHM meant ‘to eat’ or ‘food’.
In Hebrew, it became specialized to mean ‘bread’ (leHem).
In Arabic, it became specialized to mean ‘meat’ (laHm).
From the sense of ‘meat’ developed the sense of ‘slaughter’: the Arabic word for ‘battle’ is malHamah and the Hebrew word for battle is milHamah — where men make “mincemeat” of each other.
—Jomo “vegetarian peace activist” Mojo
Indeed we do - most shop-bought mince-pies and mincemeat are now veggie friendly, as are Christmas puddings.
Most of the commercial mincemeat sold in the UK, for making the traditional Christmas pies, now contains “vegetarian suet”
( made from vegetable oil ) and is marked " suitable for vegetarians ".
A good tip when buying off the shelf mincemeat is to add a little brandy , rum or whisky to improve the taste.
Will let one of the other Aussies tell the punters what “sweetmeats” or “sweetbreads” (depending on your state of origin) refer to here. It sure isn’t lollies.
Hmm mincemeat tarts.
Spicy as heck (in a good way), loads of raisins or currants and apples.
But no animal-derived products inside.
Reprise I think you may be confused. Sweetmeats mean the same here in Australia as elsewhere:
Sweetbreads are completely different things:
Both definitions from the Macquarie Dictionary