I Googled Mincemeat. Who would have thought I would stumble into some of the most condescending food blogs and forums ever created. A couple of people inquired as to whether or not it is possible to make mincemeat without suet.
Suet is the fat located nearby the kidneys; it’s creamy white, dense and, when heated, melts into a clear liquid resembling vegetable oil. It’s the traditional animal fat used in mincemeat, and more importantly in steamed puddings of the breadcrumb-base variety. It melts slowly and maintains tenderness and moisture in those puddings that are cooked for hours in a water bath. In mincemeat, it’s really more about the flavor the fat contributes.
I read a dozen or more recipes and see nothing that would be seriously compromised in using a vegetable fat . Despite this, quite a few people insisted you could not possibly make mincemeat without it. They said that since it is a holiday dish (and therefore only eaten occasionally) it should be made correctly, cholesterol be damned.
Well, they do make a good point, but I still think they deserve to be called out. In the first place, I see no reason to exclude those who do not eat animal products from enjoying mincemeat pie if they want to. In the second place—and this is where I am going to get condescending—not one of those “purists” used meat in their mincemeat. If they are so damned keen on doing it the old-fashioned way, they might note that mincemeat suggests there is minced meat in the friggin’ pie.
It seems to me (I say that way too much and it really grates on a few people) if you are not purist enough to put meat in mincemeat you really have no place at all in criticizing someone for using another form of fat, particularly given not everyone has a butcher shop nearby where this specific form of fat is most easily obtained.
(I really enjoyed that; I find sarcasm to be as enjoyable as a good meal and it actually has negative calories since I gesture a lot.)
After all the so-called purists, I was happy to discover a recipe on David Lebovitz’s blog. Not only is it straight-forward, he actually encourages us to play around with it, adding cherries, cranberries and other dried fruits, saying as the dish was intended to preserve foods through the winter, they would have used what they had, and that may well have been something we do not automatically think of when we think of mincemeat.
I’m not going to post an actual recipe of what I did, instead I’ll point you to his recipe and tell you what I did to personalize mine. I used dried sweet cherries in addition to the suggested dark and golden raisins and currants, and I included both candied lemon and orange rind since my parents have a Meyer lemon tree and I got ambitious enough to cook rind in sugar.
I held back a bit on the cinnamon and cloves since they always seem more pronounced in this pie than I like (however traditional they may be). I also used treacle in place of some of the brown sugar because I like its hints of caramel and because I like being able to say that I cook with treacle.
Finally, I used coconut oil in place of the suet—it actually resembles it somewhat, being nearly solid and white, with a pronounced fatty smell. I look forward to finding out what all these changes amount to when I make the pie in a couple of weeks.
