Holidays

The suet is ready in the fridge. All the dried fruits and candied orange have been procured. A new bottle of brandy was purchased this morning for the event. Now it’s time to make the mincemeat.

Here’s my final ingredient list. I don’t cook with measuring cups (except for the brown sugar), instead relying on a more accurate digital scale, so if you want to do this at home, either buy a scale or eyeball everything. Mincemeat is forgiving, so go for it.

Everything except the suet, almond extract and brandy

8-oz. golden raisins
4-oz. currants
1.5-oz. black raisins (one of those small boxes you stick in lunchboxes)
2-oz. candied orange peel (I buy mine from King Arthur Flour)
2-oz. blanched almonds, chopped finely
1 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
3-oz. suet
Zest and juice from 3 clementine oranges
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. almond extract
3 tbsp. brandy

Dump everything, except the almond extract and brandy, into a heavy 3-qt. or larger saucepan and heat over medium heat, stirring frequently. Eventually the brown sugar will melt into the suet, leaving the fruits all glossy and extremely fragrant.

Once everything’s all melty and fragrant (about 7 minutes), turn off the heat and stir in the almond extract and brandy. Give the mincemeat a final stir, then pack it into glass jars before storing it in the fridge. I like to let my mincemeat sit for a couple weeks before using it; it gets even tastier. But if you can’t wait, feel free to use it immediately. It’s delicious over ice cream, stirred into yogurt, and of course, baked in a pie. The yield here is enough mincemeat for a 9″ pie.

Now, the big question. How does my mincemeat compare to the orange almond mincemeat I had at Neal’s  Yard Dairy? It stacked up pretty well, thank you. The mincemeat I had in London didn’t have any dark raisins or currants that I remember (they may have stuck only with golden raisins and maybe apple), but my mincemeat has a distinct orange flavor, thanks to the excellent quality of candied peel I used and clementine zest, and the almond flavor was very subtle and nice. Oh, and my kitchen smelled heavenly while this was cooking on the stovetop.

Next week, I’ll bake this into mincemeat tartlets for Christmas Day dessert. Stay tuned.

When I was in London a few weeks ago, I fell madly, rapturously in love with an orange and almond mincemeat being sampled at Neal’s Yard Dairy in the Borough Market. I had planned to run back there after lunch, but after hours wandering the market and my brain dulled by a heavy meal, I completely forgot my errand. No worries: I’m a professional recipe developer, so I thought it would be fun to recreate this most delicious food memory.

When I was a kid, I have to admit I was seriously revolted by mincemeat. My great aunt always made a mincemeat pie for Christmas dinner, and it looked and smelled disgusting. Plus, the word mincemeat itself turned my stomach as I imagined chewy, gristly bits of meat chunked up with squishy raisins and doused with booze, all baked up in a pie crust. Back in the old days (like in the 1500s, smartasses, not the 1970s) cooks did include bits of meat in mincemeat because liquor, vinegar, and fermenting fruits helped preserve it — the technique was a great way to stretch the food dollar/pound, so to speak. These days, the only thing meaty in mincemeat is suet, which is the fat from around the cow’s kidneys. In the UK, you can purchase vegetarian suet; here in the U.S. I’ve never found it, and I’m not sure I want to because I’m positive it’s filled with all sorts of nasty, unpronounceable chemicals.

So if you want to make mincemeat here in the colonies, you’ll need to have some suet at the ready.

You can find suet in the meat aisle of most grocery stores. Grocers usually keep it near the chicken livers and ham hocks; it is also a seasonal ingredient, meaning it’s easier to find in the winter months. Not only do cooks use suet for mincemeat, animal lovers use suet to make bird food cakes for songbirds. Normally I buy organic suet from my butcher, but he didn’t have any — so it was off to Stop & Shop:

(Vegetarians/Vegans may want to stop reading.) What recipes don’t tell you is suet has to be prepared before you use it. You can’t just chop it up and throw it into your dish. Once you get the plastic off, you’ll see that not only is suet fatty, but it contains blood, connective tissue, and other nasty little bits that I certainly don’t want to eat. Do you? No, I didn’t think so. What you have to do now is render the fat so these unpleasant bits can be removed. Here’s how I do it.

First I chop the suet up a bit so that it can fit through the shredder attachment on my KitchenAid stand mixer. You want to get the fat shredded as finely as possible so it melts quickly, and a shredder makes short work of this. (Tip: freeze your small pieces of suet for a few minutes so that they don’t gob up your attachments.)

Here’s the suet going through the shredder:

I had a little over 2 lbs of suet here and once shredded, it filled up a 5-qt. mixing bowl. I set a 7-qt. enamel cast iron pot over low heat, added 1/4 cup water to the bottom, then added the shredded fat:

I let this cook/render down for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. When you’re working with fat and fire, it’s never a good idea to leave the kitchen, so keep a close eye on it. Don’t be tempted to turn up the heat to make the fat melt faster — low and slow is the way to go. Eventually, the solid fat will render down completely and you’ll be left with clear liquid fat with bits of brown stuff in it. That brown stuff is the blood, connective tissue, and other grizzlies you don’t want to eat. Now it’s time to sieve it out. I line my conical fine-mesh sieve with cheesecloth and set it over a clean soup pot:

Then I ladle the fat into the sieve. Be careful — that fat is hot!

Et voila, lovely pure suet. Um, not quite. You’ll see that this clear liquid is starting to firm up. What I do is let it cool down a bit, then melt it over a low flame and re-sieve with clean cheesecloth to make sure every impurity is removed.

The purified suet gets poured into a container once cooled, labeled, then stored in the fridge. It looks like this when it’s done:

It has no smell at all, at least none I can discern with my sensitive schnozz. It also becomes quite hard when refrigerated, but when it’s added to mincemeat, it’ll melt into the base, giving it a rich flavor and mouthfeel – no meaty flavor at all. If you want to make mincemeat at home, don’t be tempted to try Crisco — it’ll just turn your recipe into a greasy mess.

OK, next up — orange and almond mincemeat. At least my fair approximation of what I tasted at Neal’s Yard Dairy last week.

A Brit for all Americans: Alistair Cooke — The 100th anniversary of his birth was last Thursday and the Independent’s Sarah Chuchwell remembers the iconic Masterpiece Theatre host. (The Independent)

Delia Smith on pumpkin pie — It’s Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., and what’s Thanksgiving without a little pumpkin pie? But please, Delia, a store-bought pastry shell? Tsk, Tsk. I’ll let you off the hook since you’re British and the recipe’s supposed to be quick. (Telegraph)

Spend Christmas in London — Take advantage of the weak £ in the capital city this winter with these 25 tips. (Telegraph)

How to get British television worldwide — Jonathan over at Anglotopia has a two-part article on how to get British shows on your telly, even if you don’t have BBC America (which, of course, doesn’t offer every British show, but at least gives you a taste).

The 28th Great Christmas Pudding Race — If you’re in London on December 6, you can watch contestants run an obstacle course around Covent Garden Market while holding trays of Christmas pudding. Yeah, only in England. (The money raised goes to charity, though.)

This morning I was doing a bit of surfing for some fruitcake recipes and came upon a gallery of Christmas puddings on Delia Smith’s website. Yum! I’m one of those rare Americans who actually loves Christmas puddings, and their cousin, the fruitcake. The weekend after Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in November for my UK readers), rather than go holiday shopping with hoi polloi, I hole myself up in the kitchen with a variety of dried fruits, nuts, rums, and brandies, along with other goodies, and get to work on my fruitcakes, which take a couple weeks to “cure” before they’re ready for gift-giving/eating. (I give them to the handful of people I know who appreciate them, so if you’re my friend and hate fruitcake, don’t worry – I won’t saddle you with one.) I’ll write more about my stir-up Saturday & Sunday in a couple weeks. This year I’m thinking about doing a traditional steamed pudding for Christmas day, but it’ll depend if we have guests or not.

What about you? Like Christmas puddings and fruitcakes or loathe them? Tell me in the comments section below.

• How to spend the holidays in London (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
  

• Oxbridge slips behind Harvard and Yale in the university rankings (London Times Online)
  

• The lonely death of Charles’s other mistress, Lady (Kanga) Tryon (Daily Mail)
  

• How to dress like Kate Moss (Guardian)
  

• Life on Mars: It’s bloody good (Entertainment Weekly’s Popwatch blog)