Mincemeat
There are three supermarkets and four butcher shops within close waking distance of my house. All but one of the butchers are Halal, which has made it exceptionally difficult for me to find any pork products (“specialty” or otherwise), but I’ve never had any problems finding anything cow, be it organ, meat or bone. In deciding to make mincemeat this year, I apparently stumbled upon one of the most esoteric ingredients to the modern butcher: suet.
There’s nothing all that special about suet. It’s trim loss. It’s discarded scraps. It is, quite literally, for the birds. Since butchers started receiving primal cuts instead of whole animals, most, if not all, of the suet has been removed by the time it arrives in their shops. There are also a million things you could substitute for suet fairly reasonably in my mincemeat recipe. I’m sure almost any saturated fat would do. Hell, you could use bacon, if you wanted to. But man, I live in a city, and a food city at that, so be damned if I’m just going to substitute anything, however delicious, when what I actually want should be found somewhere in this city.
I should’ve ruled out the supermarkets right off the bat, but I thought perhaps they had a special order around the holidays because surely there are elderly people somewhere making puddings or something of the sort. No one even knew what I was talking about, especially the one woman who looked at me cluelessly and directed me to the Swiss cheese. I know supermarkets don’t exactly have the most knowledgeable staff, but it still boggles my mind that most of the major stores stock duck fat, veal brains, horse meat and rabbits and give you a blank stare when you’re asking for beef fat.
I stopped in at Akhavan to see if they had any, but strangely I couldn’t track down a butcher, and bought some olives instead. This is clearly not an acceptable substitute, so I asked my favorite Halal butcher at Al Amana if they had any and he was also puzzled. “What is it en français?” he asks me.
“Sew-it,” I reply. “Uhhh… sew-eh?” It looks like a French word to me already and I honestly had no idea. He shrugs, so I elaborate. “It’s a layer around the internal organs of a cow.”
“It is meat? A cut of meat! You want flank steak?” he says. I usually want flank steak.
“No, it is fat. Pure fat. I want it for mincemeat. For Christmas,” I reply.
“Sorry. I do not have this one you want,” and he goes back to chopping up a lamb carcass.
It turns out suet is not French for suet, that would be graisse de rognon, or “kidney fat”. Fortunately I do not have to butcher the French language when I go to my next butcher shop, my new favorite guys at Tranzo on Somerled. Unfortunately, they do not have any either, and direct me elsewhere. It is at my last stop (because you always find things in the last place you look), Le Maître Boucher on Monkland, that I finally find the suet.
He grabs a little over half a pound and starts to trim it up. “I’m not going to grind it for you,” he says, “because it gets stuck and I will take half an hour to disassemble the machine, but I will give it to you for almost free.” “Almost free” can mean a great many things depending on who you buy it from, but true to his word, “almost free” rang in at only three cents, which ended up being free when the cashier and I had a laugh over it and didn’t want to break a twenty.
I stopped back at Tranzo on the way home, to thank them and actually buy something for dinner, both as consumer gesture of gratitude and because I was hungry. I explained that I paid only three cents for it once I found it and he said, “Three cents? I would have given it to you for free if I had it!” Apparently even among goods that cost nothing, earning loyalty is everything.
This recipe for mincemeat has an embellished amount of candied orange zest because that’s the way I like it. Feel free to cut back or (blasphemy!) omit it, if desired.
- 1 tart apple, cored and chopped
- 120g beef suet, finely chopped
- 1 1/2 cups (275g) mixed raisins
- 3/4 cup (120g) currants
- 150g candied orange zest (from 7 oranges), roughly chopped
- 3/4 cup (150g) brown sugar
- zest of 2 lemons
- 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup Brandy
- Combine all the ingredients, except the vanilla and Brandy, in a large, ovenproof container and mix well. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 225 degrees.
- Bake the mincemeat, covered with the foil, for three hours. Remove from the oven and, periodically while it cools, stir in the melted suet and juices until it reaches room temperature.
- Once it has cooled, stir in the vanilla and Brandy, then use the mincemeat in your favorite mincemeat recipes, or transfer and seal in sterilized jars for up to a year.