Once packed with meat, such as ox tongue and mutton, alongside dried and candied fruit and extravagant spices, the mince pie is not what it once was — and food historian Neil Buttery says that's made them worse. For anyone unused to the food culture of the British Isles, a mince pie is positively strange: a sweet pie, with a filling called mincemeat and containing, we would expect, minced meat — yet it does not. This confusion was perfectly illustrated in the North American online magazine The Spruce in 2019, which took a traditional mincemeat-and-apple pie recipe at face value, baking a pie with a filling of minced beef and grated apple — then suggested serving it with custard.
The mistake went viral and the recipe was pulled. Yet it is odd, when you think about it — why on earth is the filling called mincemeat when there is no meat, minced or otherwise? Well, ‘minced’ pies did once contain minced meat and, not only that, they were not confined to Christmastime. We can trace the history of the mince pie as far back as the Middle Ages.
These pies were large, high sided and filled with expensive ingredients: dried fruit, meat, spices and candied fruit. They sat on the dining table, together with several other dishes, the pastry — which was merely a container — cracked open and the delicious filling spooned out. The mixture sounds odd at first, but there wasn’t the sweet-savoury distinction we have today and it isn’t that weird, really — think of a North A.
