Mincemeat pies are stuffed with such potent symbolism, they were once outlawed

There are traditions we share. And then there are the traditions we impose on others. Things we insist on doing at this time of year despite all the odds.

It's true that my family enthusiastically embrace all the traditions involving chocolate coins, advent calendars and edible Saint Nicks — but the pleasures of homemade mincemeat is a harder sell.

I've persevered. Truth is it's become a source of pride to me to convert my friends and family to Christmas mince pies. Correction. It's an annual obsession.

Mincemeat making begins right after Halloween when people around my small town begin asking, "Have you finished your Christmas shopping yet?" 

I hate shopping, but what I do start to think about is making my mince pies. I scan grocery aisles and bulk bins for the juiciest sultanas, raisins and currants. Dried apricots, dates and prunes are in the mix too. Also preserve orange and lemon peel. And then there's a hunt for the freshest cinnamon and nutmeg. Gradually a dedicated drawer in my pantry fills up with ingredients and the scent of Christmas. I stock up on brandy, rum and Cointreau.

Christmas in a bowl

Then always quicker than you think, Stir Up Sunday sneaks up on us. This last Sunday before the season of Advent, a kind of liturgical countdown to Christmas, is traditionally the time bakers in Britain mix up their Christmas puddings and cakes.

As I work on Sundays producing Cross Country Checkup, I have a good excuse not to pull out my largest mixing bowl on the actual day. I usually think about it some more on the drive home listening to a podcast of the BBC radio soap The Archers where Stir up Sunday always gets a mention, and I picture a nation of cooks pouring packets of dried fruit and spices and stirring in generous glugs of booze.

Because really that's what mincemeat is. A vehicle for liquor and spice. Add fresh cranberries and chopped apple, lemon and orange zest with their juices and you have Christmas in a bowl as far as I'm concerned. 

Instructions or recipe are loose terms. It's more the idea you're going for.

The actual recipes vary wildly. I have a wrinkled Sophie Grigson recipe cut out of the 1990's Sunday Times which bears the crucial phrase "this is good fairly recently made".  What's nice about this recipe is its easy-going exhortation to experiment by adding chopped pears with walnuts, clementine with almonds or "whatever combination of fruit or nuts takes your fancy." I also pull out Nigella Lawson's equally luscious instructions for Cranberry studded mincemeat. 

Instructions or recipe are loose terms when it comes to mincemeat. It's more the idea you're going for. It's what makes it an adventure every year. Or as my husband said wearily one year when I poured the last of his malt whisky, 'this isn't a hobby it's a lifestyle.' 

I cajole the kids into helping me chop and snip the dried apricots, prunes and cranberries and apples. Zesting the oranges and lemons and squeezing the juice out is another task that goes better with company. There's that moment when the kitchen table is sticky with raisins and stained with cranberry juice. Carols are belting from the iPad and the house is full of the alchemy of lemon and orange, cinnamon, clove, grated nutmeg and hopes for Christmas holidays.

Suet or not

Then we usually have an argument over the suet. My teenager daughter runs screaming out of the kitchen at the first mention of this key ingredient. Most recipes require some kind of fat. Suet, most often grated beef fat, is the traditional choice. Back in Elizabethan times, Christmas mince pies were actually made with minced lamb or beef, with fruit added as a preservative. The meat fat balances out the sweetness and adds a luscious creaminess. Also in its favour, suet has a higher melting point than its substitutes of butter or grated coconut cream. I usually go with suet to the annoyance of half my family, but one year I may try something else.

After the suet, I stir in a selection of booze — brandy and Cointreau usually — but rum or whisky is good too. Then the whole enormous mess is stuck in the fridge to marinate.

This is where things get a bit weird. I find myself waking up in the night craving that luscious smell. I  sneak down to check on it.  I pull out the bowl, stir it and breath in the heady scent. Sometimes I grate in a bit more nutmeg. I sample some of the mixture. At this stage it always smells better than it tastes.

Bits of suet glisten against dark raisins and you can still distinguish the individual fruits in the hodgepodge of ingredients. In fact the word pie originates from the word pica, Latin for "magpie," maybe because the ingredients in a pie resemble the randomly collected objects of a magpie. 

Cradle shaped-pies were outlawed as "idolatry in crust"

After a few days — or a week or whenever I have a few hours spare — I pull out the baking tins and make the actual pies because I expend so much energy on the filling, the pastry is often an afterthought.

Some years I buy lumps of dough from my local bakery that rolls out effortlessly. This is important because my best pies aren't round. They are rectangular, baked in mini loaf pans.

According to my favourite historian of Christmas, Gerry Bowler, mince pies are not just delicious — they are full of symbolism. The original mince pies were oblong crib shapes decorated with a baby Jesus on top. The contents represent the gifts of the Magi to the Christ child, spices and plump middle eastern fruits. In the 1640's in England, Scotland and Ireland, the Puritans banned Christmas and everything related to the holiday. "They even found time to outlaw the mince pie as 'idolatry in crust'," explains Gerry Bowler in his wonderful The World Encyclopedia of Christmas.

Like me, those Elizabethan bakers found making mince pies too seductive to give up. They began making them in conventional round shapes, disguised like other pies so they could still share them with like-minded neighbours without being hauled off to jail by Oliver Cromwell's soldiers for celebrating popish ways. Gerry Bowler says the lattice work on top of so many of our pie crusts is a remnant of this Christian cradle symbolism.  

A ghost as Baby Jesus

Finding a baby Jesus cookie cutter can be tricky. The best we've come up with is a small ghost shaped cutter from Halloween which makes a sweet looking, swaddling-clothed baby.

As I only have one large tin for the cradles I always round out my batch with a tray of regular round pies, usually topped with pastry stars and brushed with milk or beaten egg. I make dozens and dozens of batches in the days leading up to and beyond Christmas.

There's not much that brings me more pleasure than someone saying, "I've never liked mince pies before. But I like these."

And once a friend waved a half-bitten baby Jesus in the air, with crumbs spilling from her mouth and exclaimed, "This tastes like Christmas." And that's the holy grail of mince meat.