So I was chatting with my older sister the other day about a very important subject that I’ve been curious about for a long time, and since she is older, I figured she might be wiser. I may have been wrong about that on account of she immediately thought I was crazy, which means she can’t possibly be wise. But of course, none of that matters – what matters is mincemeat.
It’s that festive time of year again when all kinds of traditions become all traditional on us. Things like getting ugly socks for Christmas, eating too much turkey (with cranberry sauce), and repetitive couch napping in the glow of a well-lit C-tree. And of course, the present plethora of mysterious mincemeat tarts.
“Just what the heck is mincemeat?” I said to her. It was the occasion of my brother-in-law’s 90 birthday at the Valley Centre Hall (yes, 90!) and there were tons of friends and family there wishing wonderful Norm many happy returns whilst munching on little square sandwiches and mincemeat tarts. Hence the question.
I remember mincemeat tarts from every Christmastime I can remember, and I can never remember knowing what mincemeat is although I do remember wondering about it more often than you would think necessary. But when more or less out of the blue I asked Hedy (known to non-brother people as “Heather”) that perfectly legitimate question about mincemeat she just looked at me like someone who has put up with my dumb questions all her life and answered, “What are you on about now??”
So we had a lively, semi-coherent, extremely confusing conversation about mincemeat and what it is and what it isn’t and it turned out the only person at the table who really knew what mincemeat actually is was my niece Kelly. Who, for some unknown reason in the fairly recent past had looked it up.
Now, since my team of regular readers are extremely smart as well as good looking, most of you already know what mincemeat is made of, and you also think I’m crazy. But really, it’s a fair question. Is it meat that has been minced and if so, what meat and why is it mincing around? And where does it come from and why is it in a tart? These are the things that keep me up at night. Thank goodness for sisters, nieces and Wikipedia.
Because upon looking it up it turns out, for the three readers that don’t know, mincemeat is a mixture of “chopped apples, dried fruit, distilled spirits, and spices used in pastry and pies”. But hold on – as Wendy’s commercials used to say – “Where’s the beef?” So I’m confused. If there’s no meat in mincemeat why are we being mislead?? And then I continued my research by reading the next sentence and I found out “traditional” mincemeat did in fact contain meat because that was a way of preserving meat back in the olden days before the invention of ice.
Thing is, I don’t really like mincemeat. For me it’s right up there with Traditional Christmas Fruit Cake which as a cake makes a really good door stop. I mean a bunch of munched up dried fruit is about as appetizing as a tart filled with garden compost.
But I certainly still make a fuss over Hedy’s mincemeat tarts every Christmastime because by all accounts she is an excellent mincemeater and tarter and many other things and she deserves tons of love for all that she does. But I’m sure not going to tell her I scrape most of the stuff out before scarfing the tart. If she knew, she’d make mincemeat out of me.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
