A Mince Pie is Just for Christmas – not for life.

Festive musings on mince pies from Jodi Taylor

This week we have:

• Jodi Taylor wanders off piste in writing about mince pies and other festive food.

• This week’s History Briefing is about The History of Traditional British Christmas Mince Pies

• The last date for ordering signed books for Christmas is the 17th November

• A joke from the Silly Sunday thread in the Fans & Readers Facebook group

  There’s plenty to read this week and you can see everything new on the blog too. CLICK HERE for the blog.

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This week, we’re featuring Christmas Pie in the newsletter, and I’ve been asked to write about mince pies. But I have a bit of a problem…

It’s a terrible confession, I know, but I’m not fond of dried fruit. Fruit cake is only acceptable with a slab of Wensleydale on top. Christmas Pudding is virtually uneatable – I often wonder if that’s why they used to put money in it. To bribe people to eat it, perhaps. Always supposing you didn’t choke on the sixpence, of course.

Mince pies are just about the acceptable face of dried fruit. I always have one a year and quite enjoy it. Rather like sprouts. I put two sprouts on my plate, force them down, and then enjoy the rest of my Christmas lunch with a clear conscience.

My dad – born in 1921 – once explained that in those days, Christmas Pudding and mince pies were just about the only way you could get fruit in wintertime. He always said his favourite bit of Christmas was the tangerine in the toe of his Christmas stocking. Only ever available at Christmas in those days. And full of pips, too. He always insisted on having his Christmas Pudding, so we’d buy him one of those M & S single portion puds and he’d enjoy it with custard while we tucked into something smothered in chocolate. And probably considerably less healthy.

I’m rambling again. Sorry. Anyway – I needed a theme for last year’s Christmas story - mince pies are Christmassy – so I started researching their history.

Just to digress again – I wrote the story in early April and it’s quite hard to feel Christmassy when staring at daffodils but I gritted my teeth and got stuck in there. And no sooner did I discover that one Gervase Markham literally wrote the book on them – mince pies, not daffodils – The English Huswife in 1615 – than my path was clear and the scales fell from my eyes.

Just a quick question – how does that even work? Why would anyone have scaly eyes? And then, suddenly, off they drop. Just like that. Is the scaly-eyed person moulting? As always, the Bible is silent on the important details. See also the story of Jezebel. Why didn’t the dogs eat the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet? If I’d written that story my editor would never let me get away with no explanation of this phenomena and I’d have been reported to the Society of Authors in a flash.

I should at this point say that the SOA are lovely people. I used to belong to the Society of All Artists and they once sent me one of their questionnaires about their monthly magazine and how it could be improved. Unfortunately, they caught me on a bad day and instead of sitting down and answering their questions in a constructive, unbiased and above all, lucid manner, I unleashed a tirade, criticising what I perceived as the unfair amount of time given over to watercolours. Not my favourite medium. Nothing against them personally – not much, anyway – but, as I pointed out, with so many new materials on the market, ink crayons, oil pastels, handheld oil sticks and so forth, wouldn’t it be nice to have articles on their properties and use, rather than yet another interminable article on how to lay down a wash. Filled with righteous indignation I hit SEND and just as I did so, realised I was sending four pages of anti-watercolour sentiment to the Society of Authors instead. Who were probably quite astonished to receive it. I had to telephone them, obviously – from Turkey! – and apologise. They fell about laughing and even offered to forward my questionnaire to the correct destination. Obviously correctly divining that such a task was well beyond my simple capabilities.

I’ve digressed again, haven’t I? I can hear Hazel now – I asked for an article on mince pies. For heaven’s sake, why are you maundering on about the Society of Authors? The answer is that I don’t know.

Anyway, it was fascinating to learn that originally, mince pies were made of mutton, fruit and spices – very similar to those of today but minus the mutton which was slowly – and quite unsurprisingly – phased out, leaving us with the sweet and spicy pies of today. And they were long and rectangular, supposedly to represent the manger.

Cromwell, of course, put a stop to all things Christmassy, but the seasonal customs were revived with the return of the monarchy in the shape of Charles II – a bloke who really knew how to have a good time. And virtually single-handedly fathered today’s modern aristocracy. If you listen carefully you can probably hear Lady Amelia cheering him on.

Some of this is mentioned in Christmas Pie. It’s always the same with research – I disappear down any number of intriguing rabbit holes, amass a whole notebook full of fascinating facts that Markham himself would envy, and only ever use a tiny fraction of them. Don’t get me started on the War of Jenkins’s Ear. And yes, that is an actual thing.

Looking ahead to the future – it will be interesting to see whether mince pies continue to evolve or are phased out altogether. For instance, I don’t know anyone who still eats Christmas Pudding these days. Which is odd when you think we no longer have to spend days making and boiling them. When I was a child, pudding stirring was a ceremonial event. And dropping in the sixpences. And you started early because theoretically, they got better with age. I remember we had to learn a poem in school – Our Christmas Pudding was made in September. Not any longer it isn’t. Will our grandchildren sigh and say to their grandchildren, ‘You won’t remember them but we used to eat things called mince pies at Christmas.’ And the grandkids will pull a face and say, ‘Ew – yuk.’

Personally, I’d like to see a campaign limiting the sale of mince pies to the month of December.

A Mince Pie is just for Christmas – not for life.

Only having mince pies available during December might considerably enhance their status as a rare and only infrequently available desirable object. Like eating oysters when there’s an R in the month. Or possibly not eating oysters when there’s an R in the month. I can’t remember which it is so it might be advisable to check that out before indulging in random oyster-eating. Just saying.

For anyone still interested after all that rambling, here’s a link to a 1591 recipe for mince pies which anyone who has a pound and a half of unwanted mutton hanging around might find useful.

Meat to sweet: A history of the mince pie | English Heritage

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History and Happenings - click here to view more posts

The History of Traditional British Christmas Mince Pies

In Christmas Pie by Jodi Taylor the team from St Mary’s jump back to Restoration London to discover an authentic recipe for mince pies. In this History Briefing we explore the history of this British Christmas treat and provide a recipe for you to create your own.

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Enjoy a joke from the Silly Sunday thread from the Facebook Fans and Readers group.

Thanks to Anna Scutt for this one…

What were the lion and the witch doing in the wardrobe? It's Narnia business.

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The Reading Companion and History Briefings eBook for Just One Damned Thing After Another. The eBook is 99p or FREE for subscribers.

It contains:

• A foreword by Jodi Taylor

• Background information on the characters

• History Briefings giving information on the four main jumps in the book

• Floor plans of St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research

• A list of British idioms and expressions

• How to make tea like a Brit

• A recipe for Toad in the Hole

• A full series guide and reading order for The Chronicles of St Mary’s series

Available in both epub and PDF formats. You can also download full-size images of the floor plans.

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