Broccoli Rising and Nutcracker Sweet
“What is mince?” my husband asked.
“To chop fine.”
“No, like to eat. As in a mince pie.”
Ah. I explained it used to be called mincemeat and it was pastry filled with finely chopped fruit and nuts along with finely chopped meat, with suet — that’s animal fat — to hold everything together. I’m not saying it was a good idea, I’m saying that’s what it was.
He looked horrified. “Meat for dessert?”
Meat was a luxury, I said, so mincemeat, which was a little sweet, a little savory, was often made at Christmas as a food for celebration. It was a sign of hospitality, a way to honor your guests.
He continued to look horrified.
Forget about the meat, I said. Let’s focus on the other minced bits, the dried fruit and nuts. Everyone else did. Over the years, meat got dropped from the recipe and the name. It was still a Christmas treat, but people just called it mince, and it was rich, sticky and fruity — kinda like fruitcake.
The ancient Romans ate dried fruits and nuts in winter in the belief it would ensure a bountiful harvest to come. It also made practical sense — dried fruit and nuts were local, abundant, cheap and could keep throughout the winter. They added affordable dazzle to dishes and kept people nourished in a season when fresh produce was scarce. There’s even a prototype of a fruitcake recipe in Apicius’s De re Coquinaria, dating back to the first century.
In the days before Minecraft and Stranger Things merch, dried fruits and nuts were the holiday treats to get. Mince is in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, I insisted, and in Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Recollecting “the brandy, the pudding, the mince” evokes in the narrator a longing for a more innocent time, a child’s joy at the holiday. The sugarplums that so entranced children in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” aka “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” were made of minced dried fruits and nuts and warming spices.
The holidays are more complicated, commercial and consumer-driven now than they were in Dickens’s day, but I’d like to think the elemental pleasure of mince without the meat still chimes through the holidays. May they chime some holiday joy in you too.
Dried fruits and nuts enrich holiday treats like:
fruitcake — oh, don’t laugh. I mean the real homemade stuff like in Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory”
panforte — ambrosial, Italian, and with my recipe, vegan
Christmas pasta — a lesser-known Italian recipe. Like the original mincemeat, it’s a little sweet with dried fruit, a little savory with nuts, a lot umami with tomatoes, capers and olives, and way better than you’d think.
sugarplums — from my first book Feeding the Hungry Ghost — five minutes and a handful of ingredients and you have a quick, easy confection that tastes like Christmas. (Paid subscribers will find the recipe below.)
Procrastinators unite! Make your last minute gift a lasting delight. Order up a copy or two of Miami Vegan available here and online at IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
God bless us, every one.
