Another Explore Your Archives exclusive!
For our Making History event, I made the shrub – already blogged about – and, helped by my friend Mark, some festively archival mince pies using another recipe from the Webley-Parry recipe books.
Here it is again:
Mince Pie’s Meat
One pound and a half of suet, ten ounces of raisins, two pounds and a half of Currants, half a pound of sugar, half a quarter of an ounce of Mace, one nutmeg, one pound of Bullock’s heart, mix all together with some Lemon peel, then put a quarter of a pint of Brandy, and a quarter of a pint of white wine. When you use it put in Apple and sweetmeats, and a little salt.
Rattray’s the Butchers supplied the heart which was ENORMOUS. Fortunately, they agreed to halve it and (very kindly) minced it. It was still rather a lot and we only used half which was about 1 lb; Mark’s cat Vortigern was delighted to eat the rest (not all at once!)
We followed the recipe closely except we were not sure what was meant by sweetmeats so we just left them out. Candied mixed peel went in instead of lemon peel. The pastry recipe came from BBC Good Food site.
Result: Very good; somewhat less sweet that the usual ones. I wonder if one could feed them to vegetarians with them being none the wiser (not that we did. No. Not at all)
We served the pies at our Explore Your Archives event and they proved very popular, possibly on account of their proximity to the shrub!
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Ceredigion Archives 