Every holiday season Mincemeat pies make the rounds, and off hand they sound pretty nasty. After all, who really wants to eat a pie made out of minced meat these days?  Originally Mincemeat pies were made with meat in them,  but this has been replaced almost entirely in modern times with dried fruit and nuts.

The history of Mincemeat pies is a little hazy, but people have always been looking for a way to stretch the food budget and I am guessing that the original Mincemeat pies had their roots in the necessity of utilizing poorer scraps of meat and 'other parts' and making them more palatable by chopping them finely and baking them with other things to disquise their true origins.

Additionally, Mincemeat pies were a way of preserving meat. By baking the meat with fruit, spices and a bit of alcohol, they could be made ahead of time and stored for a considerable period. This I can imagine would be another reason for them to be popular in the pre-refrigeration age.

Mincemeat pies are inexorably linked with Christmas for most of us, and that is purported to be because of the Crusades.  The returning troops brought back the spices they had found and the trinity of Cinnamon, Cloves and Nutmeg were added to traditional mince pies.  These were symbolic of the gifts the three wise men bestowed upon the infant Jesus and thus the bond between Mincemeat pies and the Christian celebration of Christmas was formed.

In honor of the birth of Christ, the mince pie was originally made in an oblong casings (coffin or cradle shaped).  When the pie was baked it tended to fall a bit in the middle resulting in a cradle looking affair.  It would then be decorate with an infant Jesus for serving. The baby was removed by the children and the pie was eaten in celebration. It was even thought to be lucky to eat one mince pie on each of the twelve days of Christmas.

Who stole the meat from Mincemeat pies? The blame most likely falls on the shoulders of 17th-century Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell. He felt that Christians had no place celebrating with drinking and merriment on what originally was a Pagan holiday. As such, he abolished Christmas in England in 1657 and two years later convinced the leaders of in the colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts to ban Christmas celebrations there too.

One of the prohibitions in the ban was Mincemeat pies, a symbol of richness, gluttony and the debauchery that the Christmas holiday had at the time. When Christmas re-emerged it had mellowed out into a more family-friendly affair and somewhere in the ban, the meat had fallen out of Mincemeat pies.

Today the last real vestige of meat in Mincemeat pies is Suet which some recipes still call for.