There are lots of cooks out there who actually know what they are doing. I pretty much taught myself to cook, out of necessity. I haven’t a clue most of the time, but I do love to eat. Grandma Wade used to make mince meat pies for the holidays. She shared the recipe with Mom,and this delightfully sweet pie has been a treasured memory of mine for decades.
The recipe is pretty labor intensive and contains your entire annual dietary allowance of fat in a single serving. Mom finally decided not to make any more mince meat pies. I did talk her into spending an afternoon teaching me how to make them, but that was several years ago.
This recipe calls for a metric butt-load of meat. I’m not sure how many pies we made, but the last one came out of the freezer on Thanksgiving. I have been told if I ever want another one, I have to make it myself. Mom suggests reducing the recipe by using a quarter of the ingredients listed below.
Ingredients
- 4# cooked beef or venison (7# raw meat)
- 2# suet ground
- 8# apples
- 2# raisins
- 2# currents
- 1 cup vinegar
- 1 cup water
- 2 tbs salt
- 4 cups sugar
- 1 tsp ground cloves
- 1 tsp allspice
- 2 tbs cinnamon
Cook and drain the meat. Grind it in a food processor. Grind apples in the food processor and combine with the ground meat in a large kettle. Add suet, currents, raisins, sugar, spices, vinegar and water. Cover kettle and cook 325 degrees F oven for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally (this sounds like an ideal opportunity to cook outside over coals if you have a Dutch oven that is large enough). If the filling is too dry you can moisten as required with the addition of vinegar, pickle juice or coffee.
Place cooked filling in a 9” pie crust, apply top crust and bake until browned.
