The Queen's pastry chef has revealed her secret mince pie recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the significance of the mince pie? ›

They were made from 13 ingredients to represent Jesus and his disciples and were all symbolic to the Christmas story. As well as dried fruit such as raisins, prunes and figs, they included lamb or mutton to represent the shepherds and spices (cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg) for the Wise Men.

TAKE ONE COFFIN…

Our mince pies undoubtedly have medieval origins, although we would not immediately recognise them. Pie crusts were known as coffins, and used as a vessel to cook delicate foods or house pre-boiled meat fillings. Pastry was little more than flour mixed with water to form a mouldable dough.

The reason mincemeat is called meat is because that's exactly what it used to be: most often mutton, but also beef, rabbit, pork or game. Mince pies were first served in the early middle ages, and the pies were quite sizeable, filled with a mixture of finely minced meat, chopped up fruit and a preserving liquid.

Mincemeat is a combination of chopped dried fruits, spices, sugar, nuts, distilled spirits, a fat of some type and sometimes meat. The name is a carryover from 15th century England when mincemeat did indeed have meat in the mix; in fact, the whole point of mincemeat was to preserve meat with sugar and alcohol.

These were nothing like our mince pies of today. They were large, seriously large, and oblong as they were designed to serve a number of people. The pastry case, called a coffin, was just a container for the delicious filling and was never meant to be eaten – well not by the rich!

There are many religious connotations behind the traditional mince pie: They were first made in an oval shape to represent the manger that Jesus slept in as a baby, with the top representing his swaddling clothes.

A mince pie (also mincemeat pie in North America, and fruit mince pie in Australia and New Zealand) is a sweet pie of English origin filled with mincemeat, being a mixture of fruit, spices and suet. The pies are traditionally served during the Christmas season in much of the English-speaking world.

A coffin or coffyn referred to a container made of pastry, a precursor of the modern pie crust, and food was served in the coffin it had been cooked in. The first printed use of the word coffin as a box for a corpse appeared later, in the 16th century. Historians trace pies back to ancient times.

But the mincemeat I'm talking about is thick, sweet, spicy and brown; a sludge of raisins, booze, orange peels, allspice and other aromatics. Some recipes also involve apples, and almost all varieties include shredded beef and suet.

If you are British, Christmas without mince pies is unimaginable. Why? Mince pies have been eaten as part of a traditional British Christmas since at least the 16th century.

Is mincemeat healthy? ›

Not only is mince an incredibly versatile meat, it is also packed full of nutrients that can help support good health and wellbeing. With mince, you don't need to eat a lot of it to get the nutritional goodness.

Not anymore, a couple of hundred years ago it would have had some sort of minced meat in with the rest. modern mincemeat accepts that it's better without it, so it's just chopped fruit and spices in a sweet pastry.

Mince pies = eyes

This is a term used widely in London even to this day, usually to describe a girl's features. Her eyes would be described as Minces, an even more slang term from the original mince pies.

Mincemeat isn't difficult to make, but it has a lot of ingredients, which can make it expensive to produce in small batches, and it requires at least a day's advance planning to let the ingredients sit.

Mince pies were originally made to celebrate Jesus. They were oblong in shape to represent the manger that Jesus slept in as a baby and have a 'pastry baby Jesus' carved into the pastry. Traditionally one mince pie is eaten for the Twelve days of Christmas.

According to reports, medieval people believed that if you ate a mince pie every day between Christmas and Twelfth Night, you'd be brimming with luck and happiness for the next 12 months. While there may not be any truth in the old myth, the tradition of eating mince pies every Christmas has certainly stuck.

By the mid-17th Century, there appears to have been some connection made to Christmas, although people certainly ate mince pies at other times as well – Samuel Pepys had mince pies at a friend's anniversary party in January of 1661, where there were 18 laid out, one for each year of the marriage.

A custom from the middle ages says that if you eat a mince pie on every day from Christmas to Twelfth Night (evening of the 5th January) you will have happiness for the next 12 months!