LOL #21

Those that know me, know that I absolutely love to cook.  But as much as I love to cook, I have never had the desire to make a Mincemeat Pie. 

My first thought the other day when I passed by this Robertson's jar of mincemeat wasn't - "Oh, I should try to make a mincemeat pie."  Instead, my librarian mind went straight to Pip or even Ebenezer, two characters made famous by the pen of Charles Dickens.  While I couldn't quote the chapter and line, I knew for certain that a mincemeat pie had been consumed in at least one of those books!

Seeing this jar made me chuckle.  Maybe because I'd never before seen a jar of mincemeat sitting on a grocery shelf or maybe because I turned the jar around to find out exactly what meat was in this mincemeat cuisine concoction.

 

Sugar - check

Apples - check

Currants - check

Raisins - check

Various fruit peels - check

Spices - check

Meat - NO check!

To my surprise - absolutely no meat! Ok, so maybe I'm the last cook on the planet that didn't realize mincemeat contained no meat.  Regardless, it sent my research geared mind to spinning.

Apparently, the traditional English dish did contain some sort of meat at one time - maybe mutton, quail, chicken, pheasant, hare, liver... (At this point, I'm thinking the mincemeat pie sans the meat was a good idea.)  From my research, based solely upon the quick readings of several websites, the pies may have been originally called Christmas pies because of their oblong shape possibly resembling Jesus' crib with a small pastry doll placed in the center on top of the pie.

During the Medieval period, Crusaders brought new spices back to Great Britain which gradually and slowly replaced the meat in the pies.  Interestingly, the name was never changed.

Today, the traditionalist seem to scoff at the mincemeat pie in a jar, and this sweet vs. savory dish is alive and well in some circles - the Mince Pie Club, to be exact. This group hosts a site "dedicated to the appreciation of the Mince pie."  This site itself gave me a little LOL!  I guess we all have our causes.

So, back to my original thought upon seeing this mincemeat pie in a jar - Charles Dickens.  Let me end this LOL post with an appropriate quote from A Christmas Carol -

"There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor."