Mince meat!!

[wilnis]

Thanksgiving day my wife and I ate our feast with my 89 y/o mom at her retirement village and talked about the good old days as might be expected. She missed mincemeat pie done the 'real' way so we asked and off the top of her head she recited the receipe she used as a young woman that was her aunt's and who know where it came from. We got the ingredients, made what turned out to be 6 qts of mincemeat, and then made the pie. It was great!! I'm enclosing the receipe and wonder if others have their own that they like and would be willing to share.

2# lean beef, boiled and chopped.
1# suet-cleaned and chopped very fine.
5# apples, peeled and chopped
3# raisins, 2# seeded, 1# saltana (white).
2# currants.
3/4# citron-cut into strips.
2 tbsp cinnamon.
1 tbsp nutmeg.
2 tbsp mace.
1 tbsp cloves
1 tbsp allspice.
1 tbsp salt.
2 1/2# brown sugar.
1 qt sherry.
1 pt brandy.

Mix and simmer one hour if you want to can it.
Can otherwise just freeze it without the simmer if wished.
Can use sweet fruit juice if needed to make more moist (not needed in our batch)
We baked the pie at 425 for 45-50 minutes. It took one quart.
I'd like to know if others have receipes they've had good luck with,
Merry Christmas. Bill

 

[Steve S]

2 pts brandy are needed 1 to drink while you are making the pie!

 

[crinkles]

i have a great christmas cake recipe that this will be the 3rd year that i'm making it. if you wish i could post it.

it takes a month to make so it could be a bit late now for xmas.

 

[wilnis]

Crinkles-please do. Bill

 

[crinkles]

Christmas Cake
(Traditionally, the Christmas cake is baked about a month in advance)
Enjoy the feeling of festivity creeping up as the house fills with the divine smells of dried fruits, spices, and alcohol… it’s time for Christmas again!

History
Not many people know that the Christmas cake started out as a porridge. Over time the finest of ingredients were added, until it became the luxurious cake of Christmas celebrations that we enjoy today.
The Christmas cake was born out of the marriage of two customs in Victorian England. It started with a sort of porridge which was supposed to be eaten after the day of fasting on Christmas Eve (or Vigil, as it was then called). To make the occasion a richer experience dried fruits, spices and honey were added. These made the porridge so stiff that the revellers would tie it in a cloth and dunk it into boiling water, starting the tradition of a boiled Christmas pudding with spices, nuts, fruits and whatnots.
By the sixteenth century the oatmeal of the porridge was replaced by wheat flour, and butter and eggs were added to hold it together. However, baking was still a luxury since only the biggest houses had ovens. These households would bake rich fruitcakes for Easter and top them with almond paste (what we call marzipan). They started baking a similar cake for Christmas, but with spices and the dried fruits of the season, supposed to represent the gifts of the kings from the East. However, it was not exactly a Christmas cake but a Twelfth Night cake (the fifth of January) to commemorate the end of Christmas festivities. These cakes soon became the flavour of the season. The bakers and confectioners usually had leftover figurines, so they started baking rich fruitcakes with snowy scenes for decoration… and thus the Christmas cake was born.
However, the people of Britain would still send boiled Christmas puddings for family members living in distant colonies, which could take weeks or even months to reach them, along with a hamper of gifts (very often chunks of cheese and apple pie) that weren’t available in uncivilised colonies.
The tide turned when a German immigrant started baking Christmas cakes in America with locally grown fruits. The colonisers started shipping these cakes back to relatives in England and the American version eventually became, and still remains, more popular than the traditional European Christmas cake.

 

[crinkles]

A simple yet fragrant and tasty recipe for a Christmas cake.

Ingredients

Fruits

500g sultanas
200g raisins
200g glace cherries, halved
110g currents
110g cut mixed peel
110g dried figs, roughly chopped
110g dried apricots, roughly chopped
110g dried pitted prunes, roughly chopped
1 small orange, grated zest and juice
150ml brandy

Cake Mix

250g unsalted butter, at room temperature
200g dark muscovado sugar
5 medium eggs
300g plain flour
200g macadamia nuts, roughly chopped

 

[crinkles]

Method
Fruits

1. Soak the fruits with the brandy a few weeks in advance to make the fruits plumper and flavoured with alcohol
2. Over the next few weeks, mix with a wooden spatula everyday, turning it all around to make sure every piece gets well soaked in brandy

Cake Mix
1. Preheat oven to 150°C. Line the base of a 9” cake tin with glazed paper.
2. Beat together the butter, sugar and eggs until the mix is pale and fluffy.
3. Add flour in small quantities, stirring it in, taking care not to beat it in. Make sure the mixture engulfs air with each stir.
4. Add the fruit mixture and nuts. Fold it in gently
5. Spread the mixture into the baking tin, levelling it with a spatula or large spoon.
6. Bake the cake mixture for about 3 hours, taking care not to brown it too much
7. The day after the cake has been cooked, make a few holes in it with a skewer and over the next few weeks (until Christmas), feed it with a bit of alcohol (sherry or brandy) every 5 days.

Decoration
To decorate, consider covering the cake in a sheet of marzipan (about 500g) and adding glazed cherries, marzipan figurines, silver balls, or even jam. Sieving icing sugar onto the decorated top makes it the perfect cake for a white Christmas. Decoration ideas for Christmas cakes are unlimited, but marzipan usually features in most of them, glazed cherries too, and sometimes apricot jam.

Though the recipes for a Christmas cake vary from country to country (sometimes even households hold their own recipes against others) the effect is the same -the spirit of Christmas, the warmth of the alcohol baked into it, and the zing of the spices that make it so different from anything else, however grand, however expensive.

 

[crinkles]

I usually do the fruit one month in advance
then soak them for two weeks.

then i bake the cake a fortnight before chrstmas. then you need to put it in the fridge in an airtight container and feed it a tablespoon brandy every 4 days, through holes poked in the cake with a skewer.

you still have time if you start this weekend you would just have to soak the fruit one week instead of 2. i have used 300mL brandy to soak instead of the 150mL in the recipe.

 

[hr1940]

Here is my recipe for fruitcake. I give special people one as a part of their Christmas gift.
Fruitcake
1 lb. pitted dates
1 lb. brazil nuts
1/2 to 3/4 lb pecans
1/2 to 3/4 lb. walnuts
4 oz. red candied cherries
4 oz. green candied cherries
4 oz. green candied pineapple *
4 oz. red candied pineapple *
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
________________________Mix above ingredients so that everything
is well cated with the flour mixture
5 well beaten eggs
1 tsp vanilla or rum extract
________________________Pour over the fruit and nut mixture.
Mix well.

Line 2 loaf pans with wax or parchment paper (grease well). You can use 3 smaller pans if you want. Fill the pans and cover with brown paper or parchment paper. Set in a pan of water -about 1/2 way up the side. Bake at 325* for 1 hour uncover the cakes and bake for an additional 30 minutes. While still warm pour a small of brandy over the cake.

* can use 8 oz. of one color if you can not find the red and green.