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Thanksgiving
and the New England Pie:
Mince Meat Pie |
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Heavily seasoned pies of minced meat, suet, and dried
fruits were popular in Elizabethan England, particularly at Christmas time. The English
settlers brought a liking for mince meat with them to America. Pilgrims and Puritans
did not celebrate Christmas, however, and mince pies soon became associated with the new
New England holiday - Thanksgiving.
Lean beef, either sirloin or ox-tongue, was generally preferred as the
minced meat. It was discovered that, if brandy was added and if the minced meat was not
added until just before cooking, the mix of suet, fruits and spices would keep for months.
Later mince pies sometimes omitted the meat altogether. |
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| "Mince-meat was chopped, and seasoned, and tasted,
and chopped, and seasoned, and tasted, till all the various blissful flavors were merged
in the one, perfect, resultant, crowning flavor which pronounced the work complete. No
little hard bits of apple, cold and crisp, no sudden surprises in the way of morsels
undoubtedly from the animal kingdom, but a perfect chaos, without organization and subject
to no laws of classification. What are mince pies for? What enemy of mankind first
prompted their composition?… Mrs. Murray gave herself no trouble on this score. She
held to mince-pies, as to baked beans on Saturday, as a fixed institution, not to be
subverted." |
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"Thanksgiving" by S.G.B.
in Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1863. |
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| "For days and days before Thanksgiving the
boy was kept at work evenings, pounding and paring and cutting up and mixing (not being
allowed to taste much), until the world seemed to him to be made of fragrant spices, green
fruit, raisins and pastry - a world that he was only yet allowed to enjoy through his
nose. How filled the house was with the most delicious smells! The
mince-pies that were made!" |
Being a Boy
by Charles Dudley Warner, 1878. |
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| Click HERE for a 1796
recipe for Mince Meat Pie |
| Click HERE for an 1847
recipe for Mince Meat Pie |
| Click HERE for an 1859
recipe for Mince Meat Pie |
| Click HERE for an 1860
recipe for "Rich" Mince Meat Pie |
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| "These mince pies, when made in the best manner, are
bad enough; but when made up not only with lean meat, but with the addition of suet,
spices, raw and dried fruits, wine, brandy, &c., and put into the usual forms of
pastry, they become … an abomination." |
Food reformer William A. Alcott in
The Young Housekeeper or Thoughts on Food & Cookery, 1838 |
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Pick
your pie! |
| Click HERE
for Pumpkin Pie |
| Click HERE
for Apple Pie |
| Click HERE
for Cranberry Tart |
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