The 
2006
Christmas Mincemeat Pies!
During the 11th Century - the Christmas pie came about at the time when the Crusaders were returning from the Holy Land. They brought home a variety of oriental spices. It was important to add three spices (cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg) for the three gifts given to the Christ child by the Magi.
In honor of the Birth of the Savior, the mince pie was originally made in an oblong casings (cradle shaped), with a place for the Christ Child to be placed on top. The Baby was removed by the children and the Manger (pie) was eaten in celebration.
These pies were not very large, and it was thought lucky to eat one mince pie on each of The Twelve Days of Christmas (ending with Epiphany, the 6th of January).
Over the years, the pies grew smaller, the shape of the pie was gradually changed from oblong to round, and the meat content was gradually reduced until the pies were simply filled with a mixture of suet, spices and dried fruit, previously steeped in brandy.
This filling was put into little pastry cases that were covered with pastry lids and then baked in an oven. Essentially, this is today’s English mince pie.
People have been mincing (chopping into tiny pieces) meat and other foods since ancient times. Minced meats accomplished many things. It:
- Utilized leftover meat
- Stretched the protein supply
- Permitted meat to be incorporated into other dishes, as in mincemeat pie.
According to the food historians, mincemeat pie dates back to Medieval times. At that time, this recipe did, indeed, include meat. It also often contained dried fruits, sugar, and spices, as was the tradition of the day.
The distinction between mincemeat and mince was drawn in the mid-nineteenth century when meat began disappearing from the recipe, leaving the fruit, nut, sugar, spice, and suet product we know today.
Late 19th century cookbooks contain several recipes for both mincemeat and mince, some containing meat, others not.
Mincemeat. The modern distinction between mince, minced meat and mincemeat, dried fruit mixed with spices, suet, and often some sort of alcohol arose only gradually. Mincemeat originally meant simply minced meat= (American: Ground beef)...and we do not have any unequivocal evidence of its being used in its current sense until the mid-nineteenth century.
But in the Middle Ages and into Renaissance times and beyond it was commonplace to spice up meat with dried fruit, and it seems likely that the earliest mincepies contained a generous measure of such raisins, currants, etc.
The reduction in meat content was a slow but steady process (still not complete, of course, for the inclusion of beef suet is a remnant of it). The growing need to draw a lexical distinction between the plain minced meat and mincemeat was signaled around 1850 by the introduction of the term mince for the former.
Mince pie in Britain, is a miniature round pie, filled with mincemeat: typically a mixture of dried fruits, chopped nuts and apples, suet, spices, and lemon juice, vinegar, or brandy. Although the filling is called mincemeat, it rarely contains meat nowadays.
In North America the pie may be larger, to serve several people. The large size is an innovation, for the original forms were almost always small. 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 C hr is t ma s 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.
Mincemeat: A mixture of chopped fruits, spices, suet that is usually baked in a pie crust. The word comes from mincem to chop finely, whose own origins are in the Latin minuere, "to diminish," and once mincemeat referred specifically to a meat that had been minced up, a meaning it has had since the sixteenth century.
By the nineteenth century, however, the word referred to a pie of fruit, spices, and suet, only occasionally containing any meat at all.
In Colonial America these pies were made in the fall and sometimes frozen throughout winter.
Happy Holiday Eating and a very Merry Christmas!
Christian-Charles de Plicque
"For Your Information Series":
Angel House International Missions Ministries Association
For Mincemeat recipe and other yummy holiday foods, including Finnish Christmas Delicacies, go to: www.deplicque.net, recipes.
