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Dessert

Mock Mince Meat

A sweet and spiced fruit mixture made with tomatoes, apples, sugar, suet, raisins, spices, peel, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mock Mince Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pour off the green water from the chopped tomatoes and discard it.

  2. Cover the tomatoes with boiling water and repeat this process with fresh water three times.

Cook the mincemeat

  1. Add the chopped apples and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Stir in the brown sugar, suet, raisins, salt, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, orange peel, lemon peel, and vinegar. Mix thoroughly and boil for 1 hour.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the filling; blanching in boiling water reduces their sharp, green bitterness.
Apples
Add body and moisture, softening into the filling as they boil.
Light brown sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps preserve it through long simmering.
Suet
Adds fat that gives the filling richness and a smooth, moist texture.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet filling and helps keep it stable.

The step that matters

Repeating the boiling-water rinses on the tomatoes. Green tomatoes carry a sharp, bitter flavour. Draining and re-covering them with fresh boiling water several times pulls out much of that bitterness, so the finished filling tastes mellow rather than harsh.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, raisin, cinnamon, clove, allspice, orange):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, raisin, cinnamon, clove, allspice, orange. 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 mock mincemeat recipes

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