Mince pies are small round pies of sweet shortcrust pastry filled with mincemeat, eaten in enormous quantities throughout the British December. Around 800 million are sold each year, which works out at roughly a dozen for every person in the country.
There is no mince in them
This is the first thing to explain to any visitor. Mincemeat is a spiced mixture of dried fruit — raisins, sultanas, currants, candied peel — with apple, sugar, spices, brandy and suet. Suet is hard beef or vegetable fat, and it is the only remaining trace of the original.
Medieval mince pies genuinely contained minced mutton or beef, alongside the fruit and spices, in a combination that made sense when sugar and spice were used to preserve and disguise meat. As sugar became cheap and preservation improved, the meat gradually dropped out. By the Victorian era it had gone entirely, and only the name and the suet remain. Vegetarian mincemeat, using vegetable suet, is now widely sold.
How they are eaten
Warm, ideally, dusted with icing sugar. Served with:
- Brandy butter — butter beaten with sugar and brandy, which melts into the hot filling. The traditional accompaniment.
- Cream, single or clotted.
- Brandy cream or rum sauce.
- Or nothing at all, eaten standing up in the kitchen, which is how most of them are actually consumed.
They are also eaten cold, offered to anyone who visits the house in December, and taken into offices in tins by whoever is feeling festive.
The superstitions
Two traditions attach to them, both cheerfully ignored. The first says you should eat one mince pie on each of the twelve days of Christmas, bringing twelve happy months. The second says you should make a wish with the first mince pie of the season, and eat it in silence.
A third holds that refusing an offered mince pie brings bad luck, which is a useful thing to know if you are handed one you do not want.
Homemade versus shop
Every supermarket sells them from October, and there is genuine annual competition over whose are best — newspaper taste tests are a fixture of the November food pages. Making the pastry yourself while using shop-bought mincemeat is the standard domestic compromise, and nobody will judge you for it.
Homemade mincemeat is made weeks or months ahead and left to mature, and it improves considerably for the wait. Some households keep a jar going from one year to the next.
Cromwell
The frequently repeated claim that Oliver Cromwell banned mince pies specifically is not quite right. Parliament under the Commonwealth suppressed the celebration of Christmas as a whole — feasting, decorations and services alike — and mince pies fell under that as festive indulgence. There was no dedicated anti-mince-pie legislation, appealing though the idea is.