SC - Tartys in Applis-NEW recipe-enjoy

[Valoise Armstrong]

Tyrca wrote:
>Very interesting, Ras, and it brings up a question that I have had for
>some time, about mincemeat.  I grew up with mincemeat pies for
>Christmas as something with _meat_ in them.  My mother usually used
>leftover roast beef or venison, put it through a hand grinder, and
>added the apples and raisins, and canned the filling to use for the
>holidays.  It is my father's favorite.  As I grew older, and went more
>out into the world, I discovered that other people I talked to had
>never heard of meat in mince pies.  They thought I was crazy.
>
>Did they really use meat in mincemeat pies in period?  Or is my family
>just an abberation?  Any recipes?  Anyone?

Fruit in medieval meat pies was a very common occurance.

Actually, until the second half of the fifteenth century recipes for meat
pies with fruit seem to be much more common than for fruit pies without
meat. Many meat pies were baked in a heavy flour and water crust that
served mostly as a container for the ingredients and could stand up under
long cooking times. Some writer's have claimed that the innovation of a
lighter and more edible pie crust and suggested that this new pie crust
made the fruit pies (which needed shorter cooking times) much more popular.

This is all supposition on the part of the historians so I set out to see
if I could verify it by scanning a number of cookbooks for recipes for
fruit pies that did not include meat. Out of about twenty English, French
and German cookbooks from the 14th to 16th century one percent or fewer
recipes were for fruit pies in the earlier two centuries while twelve
percent of all the 16th century recipes were for fruit only pies.

These are imperfect statistics since most of my 16th C. sources were German
- - so it might be a regional fad.

Valoise


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