Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweets Mincemeat

A sweet preserve made with lemon, apples, raisins, currants, sugar, butter, candied citrus, spices, and almond essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sweets Mincemeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons and fruit

  1. Grate the lemon rind and squeeze out the juice.

  2. Boil the lemon rinds in water with 1 teaspoon of salt until tender, changing the water 4-5 times to reduce bitterness.

  3. Drain the rinds, remove seeds and inner skins, and chop them with the raisins in a wooden bowl.

Combine and finish

  1. Add the currants, sugar, prepared apples, grated lemon rind, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, mace, cinnamon, almond essence, and sliced candied orange and citron.

  2. Melt the butter and stir it into the mixture.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the mincemeat.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, mellow mouthfeel to the mixture.
Apples
Add moisture and body, filling out the chopped fruit mixture.
Lemons
Provide acidity and aromatic lemon flavour from the rind and juice.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the filling.
Currants
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the filling.

The step that matters

Changing the water when boiling the lemon rinds. Rinds hold bitter compounds that leach out during boiling. Changing the water several times removes bitterness, so the rinds become tender and mild rather than harsh in the finished mincemeat.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, apple, raisin, sugar, butter, orange, pepper):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Cranberryfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, apple, raisin, sugar, butter, orange, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More mincemeat recipes

Mock Pie 26Pie 21Lemon 15Fritters 14Green Tomato 13Pies 13 See all 120 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes