Skip to main content

Christmas Firsts #20 : Mince Pies

One of my favourite Christmas foods is mince pies. I am not sure I would have enjoyed as much the FIRST Christmas mince pies, filled with spiced meat and suet. The origin of the mince pie dates back to 13th century when Crusaders brought back to England Middle Eastern spices and methods of cooking meat with various fruit and spices.

The early mince pie was known by several names, including "mutton pie", "shrid pie" and "Christmas pie". Typically its ingredients were a mixture of minced meat, suet, a range of fruits, and spices such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Served around Christmas, the savoury Christmas pie (as it became known) was associated with supposed Catholic "idolatry" and during the English Civil War was frowned on by the Puritan authorities. Nevertheless, the tradition of eating Christmas pie in December continued through to the Victorian era, although by then its recipe had become sweeter and its size markedly reduced from the large oblong shape once observed.


A recipe for the pie filling dated 1615 says that the best meat should be cut from a leg of mutton and then add suet, salt and pepper, cloves, mace, currants, raisins, prunes, dates and orange peel. It is then not too far a step to the sweet mince pies we know - filled with dried mixed fruit, sugar, butter, brandy, nutmeg, cinnamon and mixed spice. Of course, there are now many variations of the mince pie recipe with additions of sloe gin, apples, almonds and nuts. 

I know many like to eat mince pies at room temperature, but I love mine heated with ice cream. I will be trying my hardest to keep up the tradition of eating a Christmas mince pie daily for the twelve days of Christmas - it is supposed to bring you luck for the coming year. Other mince pie traditions are not to cut the pies for fear of bad luck, and to make a wish when you eat the first one of the festive season - I think I can manage that. Thanks to those medieval crusaders who inspired the first Christmas mince pies - yum! 


https://www.whychristmas.com/customs/mincepies.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mince_pie

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/traditional-fruit-mince-pies/1fb44cb1-8172-4b0a-a450-01c977f9bfad
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for reading my blog and please share your thoughts about my blog post by leaving a comment.Your comment won't appear immediately as comments are verified before publication in an effort to reduce the amount of spam appearing. Anonymous comments will not be published.

Popular posts from this blog

Fish and Sticks : Art Dolls

This week I've been working on fish and sticks ....  The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and  message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or  my husband or from off cuts gifted to us  from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks.   Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt  or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...
3 comments
Read more

Fragments

 Some days are just your lucky days - today I was very fortunate and privileged to open the first ever Australian exhibition "Fragments" by  UK  Fibre Artist  Sue Hotchkis .  Here is a little about the techniques of this amazing textile artist from her own website  ...  Working intuitively with print and stitch, marks, textures and colours are exaggerated, intensified to reveal the detail and complexity within the images. Materials are deconstructed using modern methods, ripped, burnt and dyed. Time is invested in their reconstruction; pieces can take from a week to several months to create. Whilst being aesthetically pleasing the work can also act as a metaphor for deterioration and ruin, associated with urban decay and ultimately death and loss. They evolve organically, built up with layers of print, cloth, paper, and stitch into three-dimensional abstract forms that hover between object and image; to create a unique, visual and tactile lan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Textile Art Tips

Background : Today is Tuesday -  Tag day. I belong to a very talented group of artists who weekly produce a small work of art as a tag. We post photos of our tags  on the Tag Tuesday blog .  Currently our theme is alphabet, and we each could decide on our own sub-theme. I chose Australian plants and each of my tags is an experiment with a textile art technique. Here are February's tags and a brief  descriptions of the techniques used.  Technique 1 :  Heliographic Art (Sun Painting)  as in the photo above - close up of Tag E . When special sun/light sensitive paints are applied to wet fabric where objects have been placed on top, the outlines and shapes of the objects are transferred to the fabric. In this example I placed dried Eucalypt (gum tree) leaves on top  a piece of originally white cotton painted with yellow and orange" Setacolor" transparent paints and left it in the sun for about an hour. I then cut one of the leaves out and ...
3 comments
Read more