Mincemeat and Memories

Sweet and Savory

When I was a child, my favorite part of the holidays was my grandmother’s baking, particularly her mincemeat turnovers. I was sixteen years old the last time I tasted those, and I thought I would never savor that flavor again.

Recently, while doing some Christmas shopping, I scrolled through the website for the Vermont Country Store. This little store is chock full of old timey things that rev up the nostalgia machine. I primarily shop there for their excellent flannel, but I got pulled into their online baker where I discovered MINCEMEAT TARTS!

Photo of Mincemeat tarts from the VCS website.

Of course I had to order some. I ripped open the package as soon as they arrived, and the taste was exactly as I remembered. I may have shed a tear or two as I nibbled at the tart, eating as slowly as possible to make the treat last.

Story Time

Around this time last year, I published an essay in “Eat, Darling, Eat” about my Nana’s mincemeat turnovers. Now, I’m sharing it here with you.

If you want to hear me reading the essay aloud, you can find a recording at this link: Mincemeat and Memories.

Mincemeat and Memories

In my earliest memories of my mother, she did not cook. One such memory involves a can of cream of mushroom soup. When I told her I was hungry, she opened a can, shoved a spoon into the congealed glob, and handed it to me. This was how she prepared dinner. Most of the time, she was too preoccupied with her thoughts to be bothered with domestic activities. She preferred to chain smoke in front of the television, lost in some secret world while I was left to entertain myself. I don’t fault her for being oblivious to my hunger because I have no recollection of watching her eat a meal. She infrequently grazed on chips or saltine crackers smeared with butter.

Nowadays, a therapist might diagnose her as clinically depressed, but that would not have helped in the 1970’s because there weren’t any treatments readily available. Instead, people didn’t talk about such things, allowing her to withdraw further away until living with her felt like living with a ghost. She preferred to sleep all day then stay up all night watching old movies until the broadcast went off the air in the wee hours.

Child support and food stamps did not buy enough food to last the full month. This is where Nana, my mother’s mother, stepped in to make sure I did not go hungry. The youngest daughter of twelve children, and a young mother at the height of the Great Depression, Nana could stretch a morsel into a meal. Give her a basket of green beans and she would snap them, slice them, add a splash of vinegar, and fry them up in bacon grease to serve it on toast like a feast.

Growing up poor, every scrap of food was precious, worthy of savoring, even if the meal itself was not exceptionally delicious. Welfare cheese, canned pork, and powdered milk were staple foods distributed down at the armory on the south side of town. Stand in line for hours to get your monthly distribution of government surplus in plain white packages with black block letters printed on the side.

Every meal Nana prepared took on the flavor of her love, simmering with warmth, a tender hug that ran from your tongue to your tummy. She knew how to raise a child with the nourishment needed to grow up tall and strong. But her greatest feat was her ability to transform the simple into the extraordinary.

Nowhere did this ability shine greater than her recipe for mincemeat turnovers. The preparation of this exquisite dessert began months before any baking, beginning with the first hard frost. Nana scoured the tomato plants which occupied a good portion of the backyard garden for any unripe fruit, fat green orbs doomed to never turn red after such a chill. Wrapped in a worn cardigan over her housedress, scuff slippers on her feet, she stalked from plant to plant, tenderly placing her treasures in the gathered fold of her apron. She paired these emerald gems with some beef suet she wheedled from the butcher, telling him she planned to feed it to the birds. He often granted her a pound or two for free rather than toss it as scrap.

Her mincemeat recipe combined several items that would otherwise have gone to waste – green tomatoes, beef suet, bruised apples, and orange peels. All of these came together in a surprising confluence of flavor. Although no written copy of her recipe survives, I can still recreate a facsimile from memory.

The secret to her entire recipe was the raisins. She prepared them with brandy, the drink, not the person. Soak those raisins overnight in Hennessy, or Christian Brothers if cost dictates. When those raisins were added into the boiling pot during the day-long process of making mincemeat, I always felt as if I were doing something slightly naughty as the sting of alcohol reached my nose.

The history of mincemeat is centuries old. The term “mince” in mincemeat comes from the Middle English “mincen”, and the Old French “mincier”, both traceable to the Vulgar Latin “minutiare”, meaning to chop finely. English recipes from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries describe a fermented mixture of meat and fruit used as a pie filling. Originally created as a way to use up scraps, mincemeat is referenced by Shakespeare in his play Hamlet where the title character says: “Thrift, thrift, Horatio!” to mock the suddenness of his mother’s wedding to this uncle, coming so soon after his father’s funeral that the cooks repurpose the leftover meat from the funeral to create mincemeat pies to celebrate the wedding.

Over time, mince pies became a dish associated with festivities, especially celebrations of the Christmas season. During the Victorian era, wealthy people often put on massive feasts for the twelve days of Christmas, and an expensive dish of meat and fruit like a mince pie became a display of status, elevating the humble dish of scraps to a new level of elite dining. The scraped-together meal of peasants transformed into the feast of kings.

Mincemeat turnovers were a holiday tradition in our house, and I tap-danced as I carried the precious jars from the cellar to the kitchen where Nana would work her magic. Carefully crafting her pastry dough, she prepared little beds where heaping spoonfuls of her magic concoction would rest.

From the time I was a child too young to help but eager to watch until my teenage years when my youthful hands would work alongside her weathered fingers with joints distorted from arthritis, I stayed in the kitchen while she worked. Each step of her preparation was meticulous. She scooped and measured flour, leveling the cup with the back of a knife, then dumped it into the sifter. My job was to repeatedly squeeze the handle, rotating the screen back and forth, until the flour floated down into the bowl in powder fine particles. Nana brought the cold butter from the refrigerator and measured the precise amount to drop into the flour.

Temperature was as important as the ingredients in this process. The butter must be cold, as well as the bowl. Nana used a particular metal bowl which she kept in the freezer overnight. The metal bowl nestled inside of a larger glass bowl, a cushion of ice separating the two. Nana sprinkled ice water from her fingertips into the prepared flour and cold butter as she worked the crescent-shaped dough cutter back and forth to create pea-sized pieces of pastry.

When she had finished cutting in the dough, she dumped the mixture onto a wooden cutting board coated in flour and gathered the crumbled pieces into a single ball of elastic dough. She cut the lump into quarters and used a wooden rolling pin older than me, maybe as old as her, to roll each quarter into a rectangle. These rectangles were folded over and rolled repeatedly, similar to the Japanese process of creating a Samurai sword. Each successive rolling created paper thin sheets of dough she folded and rolled again to accumulate countless flaky layers in the finished product.

Once she was satisfied with the rolling process, Nana traced a grid on the dough and opened the first jar of mincemeat. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling through my nose and exhaling a long, quiet moan through my mouth, enraptured by the aroma of its contents. Tart apple, sweet cinnamon, crisp orange, burnished with the golden ambiance of brandy and clove, smoothed over by the oily richness of the suet to create an intoxicating musk.

Nana deftly scooped and plopped rounded spoonfuls into each grid, filling a chessboard of richness, then she pulled out a pastry cutter with crinkled edges and traced up and down and across, separating each spoonful into a sweet little ravioli which she deftly folded over, creating the turnover, and crimped the edges shut. Years before my birth, she opted into this method rather than creating a pie shell filled with mincemeat, finding the pie pieces too heavy and filling to serve as dessert. Each of those slices was a meal in itself. These little pastry coin purses were the perfect size to serve as a treat.

After baking and cooling, as those delicate pillows of goodness rested on the wire rack, I operated the sifter once more, this time drifting gentle snowflakes of powdered sugar to cover the nakedness of the pale dough, lightly browned, like the kiss of a suntan. As a child, I wanted to cover them in heaping drifts, but Nana cautioned against too much. The sugar was only to enhance the flavor, not overwhelm. One of the many ways she taught me the power of restraint.

The flavor was worth the labor when I bit into the tender shell. Each tiny fold of dough flaked free and melted onto my tongue like a eucharist, absolution and delight swirled together. Then the richness of the filling hit, rolling in waves of flavor as the sticky goodness flooded my mouth with savory sweet tartness, the penultimate flavor building up to an explosion of taste as I bit into one of those Hennessy raisins.

The last time I enjoyed one of Nana’s mincemeat turnovers was shortly after my sixteenth birthday. Throughout the years, I have tried to recreate the magic, but her skill and precision were not bequeathed to me. Store bought mincemeat is dry and dead, lacking the luster and life her recipe created. My pastry crust is more suited to durability than delicacy.

Our holiday seasons now are devoid of mincemeat, but sometimes, when we unpack the Christmas decorations, a scented candle will release a burst of spice when I lift the lid, and I am transported back in time. For a moment, I am twelve years old, sifting powdered sugar over a pastry landscape like new fallen snow on Christmas Day.

Nana’s Savory Mincemeat

½ peck of diced green tomatoes, seeds scooped out before dicing (roughly 5-6 lbs, or 40-50 tomatoes)

2 Tbs Kosher salt

½ peck of tart apples, cored and diced (roughly 5-6 lbs, or 15 -16 medium apples)

½ lb beef suet

3 lbs dark brown sugar

½ cup distilled white vinegar

1 lb of prepared raisins (see below)

1 pint Hennessey

Zest of 4 oranges and 1 lemon

1Tbs cinnamon

1Tbs clove powder

1 Tbs allspice

Instructions:

The night before: mix 1 lb raisins with 1 pint Hennessey and let soak.

In the morning: Take minced green tomatoes and two tablespoonfuls salt. Let these stand together four hours, and drain.

In a large stock pot combine cored tart apples, suet, dark brown sugar, white vinegar, prepared raisins with broth, zest of four oranges and one lemon, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.

Get everything bubbling over low heat then stir in your drained tomatoes. Let it all simmer together, stirring frequently, for about four hours until it melts down into a rich brown jelly-like consistency, then pour into jars and seal with a water bath.

Store in a cool, dry place, like a cellar, and bring out the bounty to celebrate the season.

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