montana cricket’s got it right. Originally mincemeat was just another way of preserving meat without refrigeration.
Maybe it’s just because I’m from Montana too that I make real mincemeat. Every year around thanksgiving I make a big batch, usually from the necks of deer, elk or even bear and can what we can’t use immediately. Thanksgiving neatly coincides with the end of deer season around here. Not many will turn down one of my mincemeat pies, the recipe, compliments of my grandmother and probably her grandmother before her.
Mincemeat is also the main ingredient, other than rum, for all the fruitcakes that take up an entire extra refrigerator in the shed, prepared a year in advance for the Christmas season.
Since I acquired a few vegitarians by marriage, I was forced to find and develop a vegitarian mincemeat recipe.
Vegie mincemeat
6 pounds baking apples (such as Jonathan or McIntosh), peeled,
cored, chopped
2 cups dried cranberries
2 cups golden raisins
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
1/2 cup brandy
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1/2 cup apple cider or apple juice
1/2 cup unsulfured (light) molasses
4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
4 teaspoons grated lemon peel
2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
Pinch of salt
Cook it all up in a heavy pot, I use a dutch oven, stirring frequently until it starts to thicken up. Takes about an hour, stick it in jars and refrigerate, can it or freeze it. I think it tastes best if it ages a few days
Just chiming in to say that in my family, we make mincemeat with ground beef, apples, oranges, lemons, apple juice, suet, raisins, and currents. That’s the way it’s always been, so far as my parents tell me.
Suet is one of God’s gifts to those who have eyes to see. It is not lard. In a sense, it is the anti-lard.
Lard is a rendered, usually soft, pork fat product. Suet is the un-rendered hard white fat from around the kidneys of cattle. It simply cannot be adequately replaced in certain dishes, and I absolutely refuse to even try to make a Christmas pudding without it. It has a very high melting temperature and an extremely clean non-flavor that make it very nice in dishes like the traditional pudding.
A pudding of that sort (at least as I make it) has no “leavening” at all. Instead, I freeze and finely chop suet, which I mix into the batter just before beginning to steam. During steaming, the batter will start to set up (cook) before the suet melts. Then the suet will melt and leave spaces, thus preventing the pudding from being a brick. It is a monument to anti-diet cooking that won’t spoil a diet–it really is so rich that only a true glutton (or one of my ceiling-bouncing children) can eat more than a tiny amount at a time.
