Tis' the season for pies, but whatever happened to the once - ubiquitous
mince pie? I can't say I've even ever tasted one....

Long and fascinating article about the mince pie...I've chosen some
excerpts. The author even attempts to duplicate a long - ago recipe:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago...nt?oid=1267308

"The Real American Pie

Mince pie was once inextricable from our national identity. Blamed for bad
health, murderous dreams, the downfall of Prohibition, and the decline of
the white race, it nonetheless persisted as an American staple through the
1940s. So what happened?

As an icon of the American way, apple pie is a johnny-come-lately, a
usurper, a pale pretender to its pastry throne. The phrase as American as
apple pie is of 20th-century origin and didn't attain wide currency until
the 1940s. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 40s are also when mince pie went
into eclipse as our defining national dish.

But to its 19th- and early-20th-century admirers, mince pie was
"unquestionably the monarch of pies," "the great American viand," "an
American institution" and "as American as the Red Indians." It was the food
expatriates longed for while sojourning abroad. Acquiring an appreciation
for it was proof that an immigrant was becoming assimilated. It was the
indispensable comfort dish dispatched to American expeditionary forces in
World War I to reinforce their morale with the taste of home. "Mince pie is
mince pie," as an editorialist for the Washington Post put it in 1907.
"There is no other pie to take its place. Custard pie is good and so is
apple pie, but neither has the uplifting power and the soothing, gratifying
flavor possessed by mince pie when served hot, with a crisp brown crust."

Moreover, unlike apple pie or anything else on the American menu before or
since, mince pie dominated in multiple categories. It was beloved as an
entree, as dessert, and, in parts of New England, as breakfast. And although
more popular in winter than summer, and absolutely mandatory at Thanksgiving
and Christmas, mince pie was eaten year round, unconfined to the holiday
ghetto it now shares with iffy ritual foods like eggnog, green bean
casserole, and marshmallow candied yams.

Most remarkably, mince pie achieved and maintained its hegemony despite the
fact that everyone-including those who loved it-agreed that it reliably
caused indigestion, provoked nightmares, and commonly afflicted the
overindulgent with disordered thinking, hallucinations, and sometimes death.

Consider the case of Albert Allen of Chicago, arrested in 1907 for shooting
his wife in the head. "It was this way," Allen was quoted as saying by the
Trenton Times, "I ate three pieces of mince pie at 11 o'clock and got to
dreaming that I was shaking dice. The other fellow was cheating and I tried
to shoot his fingers off. When I awoke, I was holding the pistol in my hand
and my wife was shot."

So maybe it happened that way and maybe it didn't. The point is that
newspapers from the time of the Early Republic through the 1930s abounded
with comparable cautionary anecdotes-as well as a lot of jokes-about the
dangers of mince pie. Supposing Allen's excuse was on the level, he got off
lightly compared to poor George Humphreys, whose death at sea, initially
ascribed to yellow fever, was subsequently determined to have resulted from
his gluttonous consumption of three mince pies-or so the Philadelphia
Inquirer reported in 1888. Not rotten or poisoned or contaminated mince
pies, mind you: just mince pies.

The mince pie we speak of here bears only passing resemblance to present-day
mincemeat pie, that gooey vegetarian article sitting next to the
store-bought gingerbread men at office holiday parties. The mincemeat
savored by our forebears was made with actual meat (beef, typically, or
sometimes venison), flavored with substantial quantities of booze (usually
brandy but sometimes rum and/or Madeira).

I set out recently to bake two large mince pies by scaling down recipes
published in the 1890s by the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco
Chronicle. (The former I chose for its local provenance and wealth of
detailed instructions, the latter for its reassuring headline: "Harmless
Mince Pies: They Are Said to Be Hygienic and Safe to Eat.")

Cautious investigator that I am, I decided to spread the risk around. My
plan was to take these beefy dishes to the Thanksgiving dinner I'd been
invited to, persuade or coerce the guests there to try them, and canvass
their reactions.

My quest began with a stop at my local butcher shop, where I scored a
three-pound roast of beef and a pound-and-a-half of suet. Suet, if you don't
know, is raw, shredded beef fat, ideally harvested from the regions around
the loins and kidneys. Except for people who stuff their birdfeeders with it
in wintertime, there's not much call for this commodity in these
cholesterol-conscious times, but the butcher at Villager Foods in Oak Park
(Illinois, a suburb of Chicago_ was kind enough to run off a greasy,
maggot-white batch especially for me at a reasonable price.

Next I was off to the grocer's to procure sweet (unfermented) apple cider,
raisins, currants, a big bag of Granny Smith apples, and a pint of brandy.

Back home I reluctantly submerged the gorgeous top-round roast in boiling
water, then left it to simmer for three hours. Simultaneously I boiled the
cider until its volume was reduced by 85 percent, which yielded the syrupy
goo known (logically enough) as boiled cider.

As my pots steamed and bubbled away on the stovetop, I assiduously soaked
and rinsed the currants per the Trib's advice, so that they wouldn't
introduce any dirt into my pies. This effort was probably wasted-I believe
our current currant producers have found a technological fix for the dirt
problem. But the instruction helped me make sense of an enticing 1905
advertisement I'd read in the Anaconda (Montana) Standard touting a local
bakery's mince pies as "absolutely free from grit." (The grit question in
turn put me in mind of advice promulgated in 1899 by the National Society
for the Promotion of Health, recommending that pie eaters ready their
stomachs for mince by swallowing six five-grain capsules of "sand from the
shores of Lake Michigan," a precaution that would enable them to safely
"digest food as chickens do.")

Once the simmering roast had come to term, I fished its gray, shrunken mass
from the pot and laboriously whittled it into pea-sized chunks, taking pains
per both recipes to remove all gristle and fat. (Heaven forbid any fat
should sneak into a dish that calls for fistfuls of suet.)

My meat minced and my cider boiled, I combined these two ingredients with a
mountain of chopped and peeled apples, a foothill each of raisins and
currants, two cups of molasses, and a terrifying three-quarters of a pound
of suet.

Dividing the resultant glop into two batches-Trib and Chronicle-I heavily
seasoned both with cloves, allspice, and cinnamon. The Chronicle recipe
additionally called for grated citrus peel, orange and lemon juice, grape
jelly, and mouth-numbing quantities of nutmeg and mace.

[...]

Mince pie was brought to American shores by the British religious dissenters
who settled New England, but it arrived under a cloud. English Puritans
regarded the dish as inherently popish, and during the rule of Cromwell
mince had been banned, along with such related pagan folderol as Christmas,
maypoles, gambling, and musical instruments in church.

Several New England colonies likewise had laws against mince (and
Christmas). Yet the dish somehow survived suppression, and as Puritan
theocracy waned and a relative pluralism bloomed, it thrived. In an age
before refrigeration, making mince was a useful way of preserving meat, and
doubtless it provided a nice change from dried beef and salt pork. And
preserve mince definitely did, thanks primarily to its gooey, concentrated
sugars (which, as in jellies and preserves, keep bacteria at bay by sucking
the moisture out of their bodies) and redolent spices (also powerful
antibacterial agents). Among their many other amazing attributes, mince pies
were said to remain "good" almost indefinitely

Over time mince oozed its way out of New England, south down the coast and
inland via the river systems and canals. By the mid-19th century it was
popular in every section of the country settled by Europeans. But it never
quite shed its aura of theological dodginess, and throughout its long reign
as America's "monarch of pies," mince remained taboo for Protestant
clergymen. Many men of the cloth actively sermonized against it, perhaps
none more eloquently than prominent abolitionist and health nut Reverend
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who in 1860 described the pie as "very white and
indigestible upon the top, very moist and indigestible at the bottom, with
untold horrors in between."

[...]

In an age impressed by Darwinian science but still largely wedded to the
fallacy that acquired traits could be inherited, mince pie appeared to some
as a threat to the very survival of the American people. Thus, Dr. Fenton B.
Turck of Chicago warned a conference of the Mississippi Valley Medical
Association in 1910 that the "armor-plate mince pie diet indulged in by all
America" was rapidly bringing about "race deterioration not only in
Connecticut and Maine, but in other states." Turck's dire views were later
echoed and amplified by Dr. Andre Tridon, a French immigrant and Manhattan's
leading Freudian psychoanalyst, who in 1921 cautioned Caucasian America that
the national diet, with its "atrocious corned beef and cabbage and horrible
mince pie," would ultimately undermine white supremacy and put the rising
black race in control.

[...]

Mince's bad reputation was also reinvigorated by the rise of the temperance
movement. The Puritans' objection to mince in colonial times had had
absolutely nothing to do with alcohol; in fact it was accepted practice
among them to begin one's strenuously pious days with a flip, a toddy, a
"phlegm-cutter," or one of several other traditional rum-based breakfast
cocktails. But the evangelical anti-booze crusaders of the 19th century were
a different stripe of zealot. We're talking here about people who declared
jihad on backyard apple trees because apples could be turned into cider, so
you can imagine how receptive they were to the argument that brandy was just
a flavoring extract whose intoxicating content evaporated in the oven. Thus
in 1885, Marion Howland, Christian gentlewoman and author of the
best-selling homemaker's manual Common Sense in the Household, felt obliged
to respond in print to the evangelical critic who harshed on her book, with
its brandy-fueled mince recipe, as a work that "stifled and sickened the
Christian reader."

[...]

Liquor would [again] be legal for culinary purposes druping Prohibition,
though subject to regulation through a system of licensing. But as with all
similar exemptions to the Dry Law (medical, industrial, ritual), much of the
product earmarked for mince pies and plum puddings wound up on the black
market. And mince itself could be retooled as a camouflaged liquor-delivery
medium: In 1919 the Chicago Tribune reported that the average alcohol
content of canned mince samples on display at a trade show for the hotel
business had spiked to 14.12 percent, offering a far more efficient buzz
than legal near beer, with its measly .5 percent. "I love pie," declared one
attendee. "Here's how!" leered his companion, and they clinked their plates
together like cocktail glasses.

[...]

God help me if I like this stuff, I thought while building my two mince
pies. But now I just say God help me, because, man, those mince pies were
pretty awesome if I do say so myself. The family resemblance of
old-fashioned mince to modern mincemeat is unmistakable, but the real deal
is stronger and yet more subtle, miles deeper, and yields an infinitely more
complex concert of flavors. The crazy taste is accompanied by a hot, fatty
mouth feel that's almost obscenely pleasing. It takes some getting used to,
I will allow, but by my third slice I was pretty much hooked. That was the
one I tried with ice cream on top, per the fashion pioneered in New York in
1904.

Obviously my objectivity is open to question here, given my investment in
the subject. But of the 11 tasters I enlisted in my baking experiment, only
two found my mince pie displeasing. Other responses ranged from "weird but
good" to "good" to "great."

[...]

Which raises a question I have yet to find an answer to: What the hell
happened to mince pie? How did it fall from grace so quickly and completely?

Meat shortages during World War II might have had something to do with
it-but then why didn't comparable shortages during World War I have the same
effect?

Perhaps the 19th Amendment killed mince pie: Gaining the right to vote may
have empowered housewives to strike against the drudgery of home mince
production. Subsequently the inferior manufactured version could have
skunked the entire brand, much as stale gas-station Krispy Kreme donuts have
eroded the popularity of the fresh-fried item.

It's conceivable that technology drove the change in eating habits: In the
era under consideration, constantly improving methods of refrigeration were
altering American systems of food production and distribution at every
level, from farm to factory to rail car to kitchen. The greater availability
of fresh and frozen provender may have altered the public palate such that
mince no longer tasted like ambrosia. At very least, the icebox and home
fridge undercut the rationale for candying a prime pot roast before it
rotted.

But these are only explanatory trial balloons (which I would be happy to
license out to any grad student looking for an important dissertation
topic). For the time being, mince's overnight decline remains an unexampled
mystery.

Imagine, by way of analogy, that Americans abruptly and collectively lost
their taste for cheeseburgers. Imagine the cheeseburger demoted to the same
rank as eggnog, ritually consumed only on, say, July 4th. Suppose
furthermore that the vestigial cheeseburgers served on America's birthday
were prepared without meat. Now suppose that a condition of cultural amnesia
set in such that we all forgot, within the space of a decade or so, that
cheeseburgers had ever been considered the iconic centerpiece of our
nation's diet.

I can't shake the feeling that the abrupt fall of mince signaled some
profound but undiagnosed shift in American culture, some seismic
rearrangement of who we are-since we are, after all, what we eat.

I promise to keep researching (and baking) until I figure it out or die
trying. Until then, I leave you with this thought from the editorial page of
the Montpelier Argus and Patriot for March 10, 1880: "Mince pie, like
Masonry, arouses curiosity from the mystery attaching to it. Its popularity
shall never wane until faith is lost in sight."

For more antiquarian oddities, patronize Cliff Doerksen's new blog, Bad News
From the Past, at: chicagoreader.com/badnewsfromthepast

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