I’ve had it, I like it, but I’m having a hard time shaking a childhood cartoon where Snagglepuss (part of the Magilla Gorilla lineup) use to chase around a mouse saying “I’m going to make mincemeat out of you”.
Growing up I could never understand why anyone would eat mouse pie.
TopazAntares:
Well it seems my Grandma from Alberta’s recipe is meatless… she told me she does use suette (is that spelled right?) when she can get some but she rarely can so she uses margerine in it… I’ll check with my Mom (who knows my Nanna’s recipe) if there is meat in Nanna’s but somehow I don’t think there is…
Suet is beef kidney fat. It’s often used for bird food (why birds would like such stuff, I do not know). I’ve seen several recipes for mincemeat that include suet.
I tend to agree that mincemeat originally had no meat as such; the term meat was used to mean food in a generic sense, as in the phrase “meat and drink”. But it probably did include lard or suet, as do many traditional pastries (and not-so-traditional…if you read the ingredients in a Hostess Apple Fruit Pie, you’ll see Beef Fat. Vegetarians beware!)
I think the actual meat was added later, by people who thought mincemeat should include meat because of the name. But it’s usually only a small amount of meat, so added to the lard or suet already present, it hardly makes a difference.
I know this thread is old but I thought I’d post at the end again anyway. For those interested I did find out my Nanny’s recipe and I even got it from Mom! And it does use meat in it… thats one of the main ingredients its not just a little bit… If anyone would like it I could post it as well.
According to The Oxford Companion to Food on the origins of mincemeat pie:
“The earliest type was a small medieval pastry called a chewette, which contained chopped meat or liver, or fish on fast days, mixed with chopped hard-boiled egg and ginger. This might be baked or fried. It became usual to enrich the filling with dried fruit and other sweet ingredients. Already by the 16th century ‘minced’ or ‘shred’ pies, as they were then known, had become a Christmas specialty, which they still are. The beef was sometimes partly or wholly replaced by suet from the mid-17th century onwards, and meat had effectively disappeared from ‘mincemeat’ on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century.”
Medieval/Renaissance peoples had amazing sweet-tooths, so the addition of fruits and sweeteners to meat fillings come as no surprise. It is possible, also, since it was known that items cooked in sugar could be preserved, that mincemeat was also devised as a way of preserving meat, especially throughout the winter months, hence its popularity during Christmas (could be preserved in pots, then used as needed to bake in a pie). The addition of suet probably also came in for preservation (fat is also a preserver) but for the addition of calories and of course, flavor–since suet is cheaper than beef.
Sorry, City Gentbut you got it backwards 
BTW the mince meat in cartoon may refer to minced meat, for lasagnes and bolognese etc. 