Having decided on the spur of the moment to make Mince Pies with home-made mincemeat (a mixture of chopped fruit, distilled spirits, spices, and fat), I'm wondering if I really should leave the fruit to mature for some time before I make them?
It's been soaking for a couple of hours, and all the recipe said was that it could be frozen, and if I did I should defrost it and leave to mature for 1-2 weeks. Does this hold for fresh mincemeat too?
On the basis that I'm not dead yet, and the pies were quite tasty, I'd say that I clearly can make them without maturing the mincemeat (the initial question), but is there an optimum length of time I should leave it for?
To clarify, this is about mincemeat as in "a mixture of chopped dried fruit, distilled spirits and spices, and fat, traditionally beef suet" rather than ground or minced meat.
Best Answer
Mincemeat originally had meat in it along with suet and a small amount of fruits and spices.
As the cost of the fruits and spices dropped the quantities started to shift until now, you never see any meat at all besides the suet in traditional mincemeat. Victorian times they would make the mincemeat in the late fall and set it aside in the root cellar for about 8 weeks but evidently could be held for upwards to 6 months. The cool cellar and the high percent of spirits didn't cause much harm to them back then. The longer the better as the fruit and suet would absorb more flavours.
Here's a link to a Google book that has a recipe from 1786:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zZIEAAAAYAAJ&dq=mincemeat&pg=PA423#v=onepage&q=mincemeat&f=false
It doesn't sound that great but then the really old dishes never were.