If eating boiled ox tongue in mince pie is your cup of tea, you will enjoy making the recipe the Essex Record Office in England found in a book from the 1700s.
The original owner of the recipe book lived until she was 93 years old, so she must have done something right.
My mother made mince tarts, also known as mincemeat tarts, every Christmas. So did her mother.
I never ate the tarts because I’m a fussy eater and thought the main ingredient was some unsavoury meat. It seemed like an odd thing to serve for dessert. Little did I know that, for the last 200 years, mincemeat has been a mixture of chopped, spiced fruit, without meat. Before the 1800s, mince tarts and pies had included meat.
According to a blog post by the Essex Record Office, “The history of mince pies can be traced back to the 1200s, when European crusaders returned from wars in the Middle East bringing recipes containing meats, fruit and spices with them. Typically, early mince pies contained minced meat, suet, fruit, and spices such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, and were large oblongs in shape.”
You can read more about the history of mince pies and find instructions on how to prepare a mince pie with boyled ox tongue in the Essex Record Office blog post, Season’s eatings: mince pies through the ages. A link to the original handwritten recipe is also available in the post. To see an enlarged version of the recipe, you need to set up a free account. (No credit info required.)
Love mincemeat. But it ‘should’ include suet, that’s from meat. My mum’s Beta Sigma Phi Sorority group used to make and sell mincemeat.
I had a boyfriend who called hamburger, ‘minced meat’. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking in the meat dept. !!