Mincemeat Pie

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If you could conjure up a British woman from the early seventeenth century, she would attest that pastry has long been an icon of old-fashioned domesticity. Command over the delicate dough was positively mandatory; as poet Gervase Markham insisted around 1615, an “English housewife must be skilful in pastry.” Not much changed between then and the 1949 release of Tante Marie’s French Kitchen: “It is good for the lady of the household to know how to make good pastry [for] it indicates an interest in domestic life.”

While pastrylike concoctions surfaced in ancient Egypt, and the Romans dabbled in a similar substance made with oil, what we now think of as pastry descended directly from the stiff doughs of lard and rye flour typical of northern Europe in medieval times. The essence of pastry is a commingling of flour and fat, its construction a matter of basic chemistry. As Harold McGee explains in his seminal On Food and Cooking, “we use just enough water to make a cohesive dough from the flour, and work in large amounts of fat to coat and separate flour particles and dough regions from each other.” The temperature and consistency of the fat is critical: if more than 25 percent of the fat molecules are solid, the pastry will be too firm; less than 15, and it will be too soft. Hit that 20 percent sweet spot, and you’ll be rewarded with one flaky mouthful.

Mrs. Augusta Wheeler’s “rich shortcrust,” shown here, falls somewhere between traditional, American-style short-crust pie pastry and the richer, more egg-heavy choux pastry, used for eclairs. It leans toward the French pâte brisée, commonly found in flans. Notable here is the tablespoon of vinegar to prevent the gluten strands formed during mixing from growing too long, which would make for a mighty tough dough. That wouldn’t do for a seventeenth-century housewife, and it wouldn’t pass muster today.

Not to burst your Christmas bubble, but odds are your mother’s mincemeat pie bears very little resemblance to the original. A means of preserving meat without salting or smoking, mince pies were known as “shred pies,” and by the sixteenth century already carried their festive connotation. They commonly contained sugar, dried fruits, spices, brandy, and nuts; after 1650, the juice and peel of citrus fruits were sprinkled in for good measure. After long, slow cooking, the mixture was spooned into jars and sealed with wax.

Beyond a clever method for meat preservation, old mince recipes indicate a fondness for pairing sweet and savoury, and loading dishes with foreign spices. A 1797 recipe in The London Complete Art of Cookery, for instance, livens up parboiled tongue with mace, nutmeg, and cloves. Spices like these, still novelties in the Old World, were extremely pricey, and their aromas very similar (nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon all derive flavour from the same chemical, eugenol). But Christmas has long been about indulging in rare treats—just think of the orange—so perhaps the appeal was less in the tasting than in adding a precious handful of exotic seeds.

North American pies, often larger than their British counterparts, were initially every bit as rich and meaty. The 1836 edition of Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, by Miss Leslie of Philadelphia, calls for “two pounds of boiled beef’s heart” and a similar portion of suet (a slightly more appetizing name for what is essentially hardened kidney fat). However, by the late nineteenth century mince recipes had begun to change, dispensing with their eponymous meat. Certainly, there were holdouts — such as Mrs. Nan Morgan’s mid-twentieth-century version, shown here — but as tastes evolved, so did the pies.