These are our best mince pie recipes for Christmas 2023 (2024)

FAQs

What is the best mince pie for 2023? ›

Without a shadow of a doubt, Waitrose's No. 1 Brown Butter Mince Pies with Cognac are the taste-tested mince pie winner for Christmas 2023, tied with Patisserie Valerie Mince Pies.

To show off their money, the rich would offer pies in various shapes, such as crescents and hearts, to show off their wealth. They became a popular treat around the festive period thanks to a tradition from the middle ages, which saw people eat a mince pie for 12 days from Christmas day to Twelfth Night.

of Christmas it brings good luck for the year ahead. According to tradition, you must also make a wish. when eating your first mince pie of the season.

Go with the tradition and eat a dozen

There is a tradition of eating one mince pie each day over the 12 days of Christmas from Christmas Eve to 5 January.

If this is not the case for your pies you can carefully run a knife around the edge to help ease the out. Sometimes the mincemeat bubbles out and causes the pies to stick into the tray, the knife trick should help with this too.

In the US, there are no laws regulating what foods fictional characters can consume, transport or distribute. Mince pies are not commonly consumed in the US outside of the New England region. Perhaps if more Americans were familiar with them they would be banned. Or perhaps not, who can know.

The reason mincemeat is called meat is because that's exactly what it used to be: most often mutton, but also beef, rabbit, pork or game. Mince pies were first served in the early middle ages, and the pies were quite sizeable, filled with a mixture of finely minced meat, chopped up fruit and a preserving liquid.

The mince pie was originally filled with meat but it's believed that it wasn't until the late Victorian period and the early 20th century that mince pies shifted to a pie made from fruit fillings. Is it still illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas day?

Markham's recipe called for an entire leg of mutton and three pounds of suet which were mixed with salt, cloves, mace, currants, raisins, prunes, dates, and orange peel, a list of ingredients that, save for the meat, which is remarkably like that used today.

Why is it called mincemeat? ›

The "mince" in mincemeat comes from the Middle English mincen, and the Old French mincier both traceable to the Vulgar Latin minutiare, meaning chop finely. The word mincemeat is an adaptation of an earlier term minced meat, meaning finely chopped meat. Meat was also a term for food in general, not only animal flesh.

Christmas in numbers

Brits eat approximately 175 million mince pies over Christmas, using 175 tonnes of aluminium packaging. The UK uses 227,000 miles of wrapping paper each year.

It has been claimed that eating the snack is illegal in England if done so on Christmas Day. The tradition comes from the time of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, when mince pies were banned at Christmas, along with other tasty treats. Cromwell wanted to tackle gluttony in England.

Going on to how one should formally eat a mince pie, she explains: 'One would pick up the mince pie with a thumb and first finger, and lift [it] away from the plate. 'The mince pie is crumbly, so make sure anything that falls from the mince pie falls onto your plate.

Why do we eat mince pies at Christmas? Mince pies were originally made to celebrate Jesus. They were oblong in shape to represent the manger that Jesus slept in as a baby and have a 'pastry baby Jesus' carved into the pastry. Traditionally one mince pie is eaten for the Twelve days of Christmas.

The Kirkland signature mince pies from Costco.

Over the centuries, the historic pies have traveled all over world, ever popular in the U.K. and some parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In the U.S., canned mincemeat filling became popular during the Prohibition era because they had alcohol content.

Holly Lane Deep Filled Mince Pies 6 Pack | ALDI.