Mince Pies!

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m making a pie, a mince pie, that’s fruit mincemeat!

I always make my own, and puddings, and cake. Firstly I put in tons more fruit and brandy than you ever get in boughten cake and pies, and secondly because I eat paleo-keto so I don’t eat any grain products whatsoever. Grains – bread, pasta, rice, biscuits, all that stuff – gave me leaky gut, so when I finally discovered that’s what my poor stomach’s problem was, and the cause of the rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, Sjogren’s’ syndrome, IBS, etc blah that I suffer from I chucked grains permanently. While you can get “gluten free” products these still are made from grains and so still cause havoc with my stomach and my health.

I make my pies, cakes and puddings from almond, chestnut or cocoanut flour instead of the grain flours you likely know much better. It’s a rather different process and needs different techniques, for instance you don’t roll almond pastry with a rolling pin, you squidge it into the base and sides of your baking/pie dish, and it’s much better to use glass bakeware than metal which will make the edges burn.

Consequently, a lot of the baking skills my mum taught me are no good now … but her recipe books still are! I still have the set of little brown, what we would now call A5, books, with all the recipes she got from her mum and friends. It goes back a century now, Mum began making it when she was seven years old! And I still use them, all I need to do is swap out the grain flour for nut flour and – believe it – Mum has just a few recipes that use nuts. In her day nuts were something of a luxury unless you had a nut orchard or were good at foraging in the woods. Her brothers were, so there’s how to grind chestnuts, cob, hazel and acorns to make flour, and what she used them for.

We’ve lost so, so, much of our native woodland now. Much of it went for “forestry”, ie cheap softwood from foreign pines. Then there’s farming. Farming, especially modern industrialised farming, has stolen land from wildlife hand over fist, and is still doing so. You may wel not realise but those “lovely green fields” you admire from the car window are actually green deserts as far as wildlife is concerned, no weeds, no mixed grasses, no herbs, few hedges or trees, no flowers, no seeds, nuts, berries, so what is wildlife supposed to live on, where it its home? You probably realise all that makes me very angry.

Add in that modern food is mostly full of artificial crap. Think ice cream. Do you think there’s any cream, or any actual fruit, in the ice cream you buy? Unless you buy small scale artisan ice cream I can assure you there isn’t! And ice cream is another recipe I make out of Mum’s books, it’s dead simple, all you need is fruit and cream, and a freezer! Oh and Mum added honey to some of them like rhubarb ice cream, the honey was from my Uncle Perce’s hives, in the huge orchard where I used to look after the hens and collect the eggs as part of my pocket money 😊.

But back to my mince pie. I made the mincemeat a couple of days ago, tons of currants, raisins, sultanas, mixed peel, oranges and lemons, and my own-grown apples, plus cinnamon, mixed spices and, of course, suet. It takes a couple of day because you need to let it stand to absorb the flavours, and then very slowly bake in the covered glass bowl for three hours. The scent is to die for! This morning I added the bottle of brandy and this afternoon I’ll make the almond pie crust and bake the pie. Perfect to go with the Blanquette de Limoux for New Year’s Eve 😊

Happy New Year to You All