Mince Pies

These tartelettes teach patience before pastry. The one true thing to know is that the month of maceration is the dish: dried fruit, candied rind, apple, orange, allspice, brandy, Madeira and rum must become one dark, fragrant preparation before the oven enters the conversation.

The classical entry assumed brigade quantities, an earthenware crock in a reliably cold larder and a pastry bench with both short paste and puff paste ready. At home, the batch is quartered to twelve deep tartlets, a lidded glass jar replaces the crock, and good all-butter pâte feuilletée replaces hours of lamination. Those are scaffolding. The separate short-paste case, puff lid, beef, suet and full month given to the fruit are the dish, and they stay. One change is deliberate: cooked beef and fresh suet join only for the final overnight rest, because holding them for a month in a domestic refrigerator is not sound practice.

The step that decides the baking is temperature. Fill cold shells, seal them with cold puff lids and put them onto a hot baking sheet. If the pastry softens while you work, stop and chill it. Then the lids rise in crisp layers, the short paste holds firm and the mincemeat glistens darkly through its little vent.