I vaguely remember mincemeat pies being produced occassionaly for
family holiday feasts when I was a child, and I remember not liking
them. However, along with those visual and informational memories, I
think I can still remember the flavor of the bite of pie I was
imposed-upon to try, or perhaps it is the aroma, and it has grown on
me these many minceless years. I find myself increasingly eager to
try another bite.
As my available mincemeat pie recipes all begin, "Open a jar of
mincemeat," (good luck finding Ye Olde Mincemeat on the shelf of a
Japanese supermarket) and imagining the ingredients for homemade
multitudinous, exotic, and even harder to find, it wasn't until this
season that I looked up a from scratch mincemeat recipe.
Sure, the ingredient list is a bit long, and not everything can be
found in the everyday market, but it didn't look that hard, one of
the exotics, suet, I found on the Web at a suet-reasonable price,
and I could imagine reasonable substitutes for some of the others.
On the way home from work tonight I stopped by a downtown grocery
that specializes in imported foods and ingredients to see if it might
not be too hard to assemble what I needed for a mincemeat
experiment. I had spotted fewer of the exotics than I had hoped for
when my glance drifted to the top shelf: mincemeat in a jar.
It is vegetarian stuff, but on the other hand, it's possible either
me or one or more of the kids isn't going to like the stuff after
all. The jar was expensive-ish \600, but that's probably worth the
saved time if the experiment goes bad. Maybe this year I'll practice
pie crust and save the meat-mincing for next year.
