Another Helping Of Mince Pie
Cooks and bakers in the 17th century were keen to explore the potential of the mince pie, becoming ever more adventurous with their recipes. Thomas Dawson delighted his readers in The Good Housewife’s Jewel (1598) with a recipe for a spiced pie using the humbles or innards of a deer, while others used one or more of tongue, lamb’s stones otherwise known as testicles, udder, and tripe. Instead of meat some used fish, Markham including a recipe featuring pickled herring, while Robert May in 1660 put salmon, eel, and sturgeon in the same spiced pie.
Reflecting this spirit of experimentation, by Tudor times the spiced meat pie had become known as Shrid pie, a variant of which, Shred, was used as late as 1699 by Cumbrian chef, Elizabeth Brown, in her handwritten recipe book. The first recorded reference to mince pies, curiously, appeared in a document from 1624, locked away in the state papers of King Charles I’s then secretary of state, Edward Conway. It gives a recipe for “six Minst pyes of indifferent bigness”, the word “mince” derived from the Middle English verb for chopping finely, “mincen”. Of indifferent bigness they might have been to Conway, but the mix comfortably makes twenty-four modern-day mince pies.
There is no evidence that mince pies fell victim to Oliver Cromwell’s crack down on religious feasts and ceremonies, but that did not prevent his critics after the Restoration from claiming that he saw their rich and decadent spices as the epitome of Popery. A rhyme from 1661 fixed the canard in the popular imagination; “all plums the Prophet’s sons defy/ and spice broth’s are too hot/ treason’s in a December-pye/ and death within the pot”. Fake news is nothing new.
On Christmas Eve, 1663, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that when he returned home, he found his wife making mince pies, while, three years later, on Christmas Day he went to church alone, “leaving my wife desirous to sleep, having sat up till four this morning seeing her mayds make mince-pies”. On his return he “dined well on some good ribs of beef roasted and mince pies”. Mince pies were not just reserved for Christmas. Attending a friend’s anniversary party, Pepys recorded that the centre piece were eighteen mince pies, one to mark each year of connubial bliss.
By the 18th century cheaper cuts of meat such as tongue and tripe replaced the traditional mutton, pork, or beef, and around the middle of the century an even more important change occurred, the transformation of mince pies from a savoury to a sweet dish. Hannah Glasse reflected this change in Art of Cookery (1747), instructing her reader to blend currants, raisins, apples, sugar, and suet. Before baking, the mix was layered in pastry crust along with lemon, orange peel, and red wine. Showing that meat was now optional she added, “if you chuse meat in your pies parboil a neat’s tongue, peel it, and chop the meat as fine as possible and mix with the rest”.
The availability of sugar at affordable prices, albeit at tragic human cost, led to a growth in the popularity of sweet pies, which by the 19th century were made with shortcrust pastry at the base and puff pastry at the top. Nevertheless, the tradition of using meat lingered on, Mrs Beeton feeling it necessary to include recipes in her Book of Household Management (1861) for mincemeat with and without meat.
By the 20th century, though, mince pies, now a firm Christmas favourite, were almost exclusively meat-free, the only vestige of their meaty heritage lingering in the name attributed to the filling, mincemeat. Even then, meat was used historically as a portmanteau word to describe foodstuffs in general rather than just animal flesh.
Whilst eschewing meat, today’s manufacturers still cannot resist the opportunity to tinker with mince pies to broaden their appeal, cheese pastry and Biscoff biscuit being amongst the flavours on offer this year.
Truly, they are pies for all seasonings.
