In one episode of Friends, Rachel makes a trifle for Thanksgiving. Joey and Ross ask what is inside, so she tells them: a layer of ladyfingers, jam, custard, raspberries, more ladyfingers, beef sauteed with peas and onions, bananas and whipped cream.
“The beef?” she asks, when Ross looks alarmed. “Yeah, I thought that was weird, too,” she says. “But then, you know what, I thought: there’s mincemeat pies and that’s an English dessert, too. These people, they just put very strange things in their food.”
And so to this week’s viral tweet, in which the British journalist Luke Bailey pointed out that a US food website had only gone and done a Rachel. Indeed, a few months ago, the Spruce Eats published a recipe, with step-by-step pics, for a large mincemeat-and-apple tart.
As the site has since explained, its photographer confused sweet mince-pie mincemeat with beef mince to create the “abomination” over which Bailey was obsessing: a fluted shortcrust pastry case filled with pink, raw mince, topped with sliced apple, butter and sugar, ready to be baked into what the website said would make “a lovely tea-time delicacy” to serve with custard or brandy sauce.
Of course, you, me and everyone else looking at the shot of an oversized, uncooked burger smashed into a crust will have the same reaction Ross does to Rachel’s misstep: BEEF? IN DESSERT? Oh, no no no no no. But if you take a step back and look at what else we do to our meats, you will realise that the combo really isn’t all that odd. We caramelise pork ribs and simmer lamb with prunes or apricots; we dose curries with chutney as sweet as jam; and we glaze chicken with honey.
Besides, our Christmas treats were once named rather more literally. Until as late as the 19th century, it was perfectly acceptable to mix in ox tongue, say, with your dried fruit. To this day, any fruit-only mincemeat made to a traditional recipe will include suet – AKA beef fat.
Sure, it wasn’t the Spruce Eats’ intention to give its readers a history lesson. But is the pie it originally shot truly inedible? I determined to find out.
Following the recipe as stated, I make an egg-enriched, all-butter shortcrust pastry. I fry the meat off with some butter, though; since I am supposed to get people to taste this, I can’t risk the mince not being cooked. (I also salt it, because of course I do. Wouldn’t you?)
Next, I fill one half of the pastry with straight beef, the other with beef mixed with a dollop of sweet mincemeat, so I can compare the flavours. Finally, I top it all with apple, sugar and butter.
A friend pops round just as the tart is coming out of the oven, so we tuck in. “How yum,” she says. “I was not looking forward to that, but it’s surprisingly good.”
And she is right. The pastry is a dream – and crucial, I think, to the whole thing working. The sugar is plentiful, the apples cooked down into something moreish, the combination delicious. I have a jar of chutney on standby, in case it is the only way to stomach the tart, but it doesn’t need it. So long as I wasn’t calling it dessert, I would happily serve a pie made just with ground beef. Who would have thought it?
