Charles Carter’s 1732 Recipe for ‘Minc’d Pyes’
“Take a Neat’s Tongue, parboil it, shred it, and to a Pound of the Meat allow two Pound of Beef Suet shred small, and five or fix Pippins, a green Lemon peel : Season this Quantity with an Ounce of sweet Spice and any other Quantity proportionably ; add two Pound of Currants, and a quarter of a Pound of Citron, Lemon and Orange-peel, half a Pint of Sack, and a little Orange Flower Water : Mix these all together and fill your Pyes. According to the Quantity of your Meat you must encrease or diminish the rest of the Ingredients.
You may if you please add the Juice of a Lemon, two Spoonfuls of Verjuice, two or three Pippins hack’d small, some Dates stoned and slic’d, and a few Raisins, stoned and cut small.”
Charles Carter, The Compleat City and Country Cook: or, Accomplish’d Housewife (1732)
‘Tis the season! Yuletide is drawing nigh and all that, which means that mince pies are finally available to buy / have been on sale since September (delete as applicable for your local shopping situation). Of course, back in the day, there was no such thing as a bought-in mince pie – also known as: “minc’d pye” or “minced pie”, and according to John Brand and Henry Ellis’s Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1849), “mince-pies”, “shrid pies” or “shred pies”, and “minched pies” – so if you wanted to enjoy a sweet and spicy seasonal treat then you had to make your own pies, and your own mincemeat, too.
Handily, a great many recipe, or receipt, books of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contained a recipe very similar1I say very similar because recipe books of the time were notoriously incestuous; everyone copied recipes from pretty much everyone else. And indeed, in the introduction to his book, Carter says that the recipes in the Appendix section – which includes the one for “minc’d pyes” – have been gathered from other expert cooks, including “a noble Lady deceased, to whom the World is very much obliged”. So at least he admits that he’s copying, which a lot of other authors do not. to the one above, from Charles Carter’s 1732 volume The Compleat City and Country Cook which, whilst it’s far from the earliest minc’d pye recipe I’ve found, is probably one of the easier ones to follow.
Sorry, I can’t resist a quick aside… the earliest recipe for something called “minc’d pye” that I’ve found so far is Gervase Markham‘s, from Country Contentments; or the English Huswife (1623). But there are earlier references.
Ben Johnson’s short comedy play ‘Christmas, His Masque’, which was apparently presented at court in 1616, during the reign of James I, included a character called “Minc’d-pie”, who was one of the ten children of “old Gregory Christmas”. This suggests that people were making minc’d pies, and associating them with Christmas, in the early 17th century, even if recipes for them weren’t being published, or perhaps published recipes just haven’t survived.
There’s also the phrase “Mince-pie guest” in a satirical epigram written by Samuel Rowlands in 1607. Perhaps a “mince-pie guest” was someone who expected to be fed the finest foods, and thereby abused their hosts’ hospitality? Intriguing.
{EDIT 03.12.24} According to an 1878 reproduction of Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Pointes of Hood Husbandrie, collated from the 1573, 1577 and 1580 editions, chapter 29, on Christmas provisions included the phrase “shred pies of the best”, so that’s an even earlier association.
Another mid-sixteenth century text, A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye, has a recipe for “A pye of Alowes” that features a thin-sliced leg of mutton stuffed with herbs, egg yolks, dates and raisins, then seasoned with sugar, cinnamon, saffron, salt and more egg yolks, dates and raisins.
Even earlier than that, in the Forme of Cury (c.1390), there are a couple of recipes for tarts, or tarteletes, that mix pork or veal with eggs, prunes, dates, raisins, spices, sugar and salt, which are surely precursors to all the later “minc’d pyes”. {end EDIT}
Right, that’s the aside over, back to the Charles Carter recipe and let’s start with that first ingredient: “Neat’s tongue”, parboiled2It’s important to note that although today we take parboil to mean ‘partially boiled’, in the 18th century and earlier it was more likely to mean well boiled, based on the etymology of ‘parboil’, from Old French parboillir, “to boil thoroughly”. and shredded3One of those very similar recipes, from John Nott’s The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary (1725) adds the detail: “…cut away the root, and peel it … Slice the Tongue and mince it small” which is… useful to know.. That’s beef tongue, or calves’ tongue, so this is going to be a meaty mincemeat mix. This may sound strange, or even off-putting to some, but many people swear by it, including food historian and chef Dr. Neil Buttery of the British Food History podcast (of which I am a Big Fan), who recorded a 2023 Xmas Special on Mince Pies and has also discussed mince pies and mincemeat several times on his British Food – A History blog.
If you really don’t fancy dealing with a cow’s tongue then I’ve seen another recipe that uses a bullock’s heart instead. No? Well, if you’re really not happy about cooking large chunks of tongue or heart, plenty more recipes use lean beef, or leg of mutton – such as Hannah Woolley‘s, from The Queen-Like Closet (1670) in which there’s a recipe “To make the most excellent and delicate pies”, which is the same essential minced pie recipe as re-used by so many other authors after Woolley – or generic “Meat”, per The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book; and Compleat Family Cook third edition (1738) by Sarah Harrison. Intriguingly, the same volume also has a recipe for “Umble Pye” that takes “the Umbles of a Buck” – a.k.a. the edible innards, so probably the hear, lungs, liver, kidneys etc. – and then adds apples, dried fruit, spices and citrus juice in an all-but identical method to the “minc’d pye” recipe in the same volume. And there are plenty of highly-spiced and fruited venison recipes in the archives, so you can probably swap in any one or two of those cuts if you prefer.
You’ll also need to add beef suet, which you may need to source from an actual butcher, and then a selection of fruit and spices. “Pippins” were a broad type of apples4For instance, on p.134 of Pomona, or The Fruit Garden Illustrated (1728) by Batty Langley there’s a list of apples that includes several ‘Pippin’ apples: ‘French’, ‘Golden’, ‘Holland’, ‘Kirton’, Kentish’, ‘Russet Golden’, ‘Stone’ and ‘Spencer’. rather than a specific variety, and in 1732 the ‘Golden Pippin’ was probably the most popular. I’ve not looked into the history of the terminology (yet) but I get the sense they were sharp eating apples, so perhaps a late-season variety, like ‘Ashmead’s Kernel’, or ‘Winter Gem’, or just a nicely-ripened ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ or ‘Blenheim Orange’ would be the sort to aim for nowadays. I suspect “Green lemons” are unripe lemons, rather than limes. Although I’m sure you can add whichever acidic citrus juice you fancy.
Then we have a few pounds of dried fruit and peel, spices and half a pint of “Sack“, or fortified Spanish wine; sherry will do if that’s what you can get hold of. A splash of orange flower water finishes the ingredients list – unless you want to add any of the optional extras: more pippins, dates, raisins, lemon juice or verjuice – and then it’s a case of mixing well and leaving it to settle and mature for a while before using it to bake up a batch of “mic’d pyes”.
“But what” (I hear you cry) “about the pastry? Where’s the pastry recipe?” Well, if you’re not an accomplished pastry cook already – in which case I’m sure you’ll have a batch of something suitable resting in the fridge already – then Mr. Carter does provide you with a selection of pastry recipes – or rather “paste” recipes; “pastry” being the art of paste-making, in the same way that “cookery” is the art of cooking – including “puff-paste”, “tart patty-pan paste”, “pasty-paste, or paste for meat pyes”, “almond paste”, and “hot butter paste for raised pyes”.
I’m thinking the almond paste might go nicely with the minc’d pye filling, in which case, here are your instructions:
“Take a Pound of Almonds and blanch them and beat them in a Mortar very fine ; put some Water to them to keep them from oiling ; then mix up your Almonds with two Pounds of Flower, rubbing it well in with one Pound of powder’d Sugar ; then put in half a Pound of Butter and six Yolks of Eggs, with two Whites ; this Paste will serve for rich Tarts or sweet Pyes ; it will soon bake.”
Ah, there we go: “this Paste will serve for rich Tarts or sweet Pyes”, I was right. And quite a lot of rich tarts and sweet pyes, too; do feel free to reduce the quantities proportionally. I’m sure I don’t have to point out that “flower” refers to ground wheat flour, and not flowers, e.g. “nasturtiums”, do I? And I suspect “powder’d” sugar would have been closer to caster sugar than icing sugar? I might be wrong there, in which case I’m sure someone (probably the extremely knowledgeable and ever-helpful Dr. Christopher Monk) will soon set me straight.
So, what do you reckon? Do you feel inspired to make up a batch of properly meaty mincemeat this Yuletide season? Does the thought of all that meat in your mince put you off?5Apologies all the way through to vegan and vegetarian readers: this clearly hasn’t been a historical recipe for you to get stuck into… Is the recipe missing that secret ingredient that really makes a batch of mincemeat sing? Do please let me know, via the comments.
Footnotes
- 1I say very similar because recipe books of the time were notoriously incestuous; everyone copied recipes from pretty much everyone else. And indeed, in the introduction to his book, Carter says that the recipes in the Appendix section – which includes the one for “minc’d pyes” – have been gathered from other expert cooks, including “a noble Lady deceased, to whom the World is very much obliged”. So at least he admits that he’s copying, which a lot of other authors do not. ↩︎
- 2It’s important to note that although today we take parboil to mean ‘partially boiled’, in the 18th century and earlier it was more likely to mean well boiled, based on the etymology of ‘parboil’, from Old French parboillir, “to boil thoroughly”. ↩︎
- 3One of those very similar recipes, from John Nott’s The Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary (1725) adds the detail: “…cut away the root, and peel it … Slice the Tongue and mince it small” which is… useful to know. ↩︎
- 4For instance, on p.134 of Pomona, or The Fruit Garden Illustrated (1728) by Batty Langley there’s a list of apples that includes several ‘Pippin’ apples: ‘French’, ‘Golden’, ‘Holland’, ‘Kirton’, Kentish’, ‘Russet Golden’, ‘Stone’ and ‘Spencer’. ↩︎
- 5Apologies all the way through to vegan and vegetarian readers: this clearly hasn’t been a historical recipe for you to get stuck into… ↩︎
