Christmas Fare in Other Countries

Inspired by Jenise's interesting post on food for Thanksgiving in black vs white households, I found this Christmas food in different parts of the world. Some look pretty horrid but some look like something I'd like to try. They missed out Japan, where the Xmas dish of choice is apparently KFC!

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/holiday-foods

Ref the entry on Britain:-

It's a bit vague - when does 'traditional' refer to?

Also known as mincemeat or Christmas pie, mince pie is a widely popular and historical holiday dessert

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I've never heard a mince pie referred to as a Christmas pie. It's a dessert only in the way it's not served as a savoury. but it is served with coffee/tea around Christmas time like biscuits (cookies) are served at other time. Also traditionally (certainly during my lifetime) with coffee after the Christmas day lunch

Despite its name, most modern mincemeat pies are meatless. Traditionally, mince pies were made of shredded beef or mutton, suet, dried fruit, and spices.

Never known them to contain shredded beef. Suet used to be used in making pastry, but nowadays butter, margarine or vegetable shortening is used

Interestingly, the pies used to be oblongly shaped to represent a manger, although most mince pies served today are circular.

Represent a manger? I've never seen on that's not round.

Bill Bryson is an American writer who came to live in Britain - here he talks about his first encounter with a mince pie - and a British Christmas.

Then I grew up and moved to England, where I discovered an entirely different kind of Christmas – a Christmas that was fascinating, full of surprises, drenched in centuries of tradition and wholly bewildering all at once – as most things in Britain are if you are foreign.

Nearly everything about it was new to me. I had never heard of Boxing Day, though I warmed to the concept immediately. I had never pulled a Christmas cracker – didn’t know that such things existed – and so had never worn a paper hat on Christmas Day or enjoyed the rich humour of an English cracker riddle or watched grown people scramble with something approaching violence to claim a plastic trinket as if it were a rare jewel.


I had never heard Santa Claus described as Father Christmas or attended a Christmas pantomime. I had never eaten a mince pie, and – I will be frank with you – for the first five or six seconds of my first one, I rather wished that I still hadn’t. But then a strange sense of joy and rapture washed over me, and I realised that mince pies are divine.

You must understand that where I come from, a foodstuff cannot properly be considered delicious unless it is about the size of a cannonball and is either deep-fried and drowning in melted cheese and jalapeño peppers or made of thick molten chocolate and topped with a mountain of whipped cream and caramel sauce, or possibly all of those things at the same time.

And here was a treat so modest that you could hold it in the palm of your hand and which was filled with nothing but a shiny brown goo that rather brought to mind something pulled from a clogged drain. And yet it was delicious. What a thrilling discovery.

I turned to the kindly young woman who had just presented me with this delectable surprise. Though she didn’t yet know it, she would be spending the next 50 or so Christmases with me.

“But I thought mince was meat,” I said in some perplexity.

“It is,” she agreed.

“Well, if I am completely honest with you, I don’t taste any meat in this.”

“That’s because there’s no meat in it.”

“Ah – just like a British Rail ham sandwich!” I cried, thinking I was beginning to understand this strange country at last.

Everything was like this — fascinating and confusing and unexpected all at once. There was a magazine called Radio Times, which wasn’t about radio at all except for a couple of pages at the back, which came as a double issue at Christmastime, which somehow made it doubly exciting.

My wife’s family passed it around among themselves, and they all circled the programmes they wanted to watch until every programme in the magazine was circled, and then it got put in a rack and never consulted again. I had a look at it once and was surprised to find that it only listed programmes for BBC1 and BBC2, which was all the BBCs there were in those days.

“There’s nothing here for ITV,” I pointed out to my future wife.

“No, you have to buy TV Times for the ITV programmes.”

I was confused again. “But if Radio Times is about TV,” I said, “shouldn’t TV Times be about radio?”

“That makes absolutely no sense,” she said, just a bit curtly, and I realised that I was still a long way from understanding her country and probably always would be.

full article at https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/bi ... r-AA13LpQo

[Jenise]

Peter, though mincemeat pies actually made with beef haven't crossed your path, once upon a time they certainly did and some are probably still out there.

According to The Christmas Encyclopedia, mincemeat pie — also commonly referred to as mince pie or Christmas pie — originated in medieval England. After knights returning from the Crusades came back with spices in-tow, they became common ingredients of the dish along with minced bits of meat (from a range of animals), suet, apples, sugar, raisins, and molasses. "They were about 30 to 50 percent meat in the late Tudor era," says food historian Annie Gray, Ph.D. "And the meat content dwindled slowly over the next 300 years — part of a wider process of distinguishing sweet from savory and delineating which foods sat in which course in meals."

"They also got smaller — Tudor pies were large, to be shared, but by the [18th century] they were individual," says Gray.

Mincemeat pies weren't just large pastries in the Tudor period, they also played a role in the history of one of England's most historic monasteries.

During Henry VIII's reign, he began phasing out Catholic properties and seizing them in the Dissolution of the Monasteries that started in 1536. Richard Whiting, the abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, tried to curb the king's greed by secretly sending him a mincemeat pie containing hidden deeds to several of the abbey's costliest estates. A few of these deeds were stolen by Whiting's servant, Thomas Horner, who was immortalized for his deed in the nursery rhyme "Little Jack Horner." Despite Whiting's attempt to save it, Glastonbury Abbey was later seized by Henry, and — according to The Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Other Essays by Francis Aidan Gasquet — Whiting and two of his priests were hanged for treason.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, mincemeat pie went beyond just a holiday treat and also offered significant symbolism. Around Christmas, it was popular to bake an elaborate pie that had dough resembling baby Jesus and included spices and sweetmeats as representatives of the gifts from the visiting Magi. This practice was often associated with Roman Catholicism, which prompted the Puritans — in both England and American colonies — to outlaw mincemeat pie due to its idolatrous nature.

"By the end of the [19th century] it was fairly rare to find actual meat in [mincemeat], though of course, the suet was beef," says Gray. "Fully vegetarian mincemeat pies had to wait until veggie suet was invented," which would have come to fruition around the early 20th century due to the invention of Crisco, the world's first all-vegetable based solid fat.

Today, mincemeat pie has significantly less religious and political implications in our society than in the past. Nowadays, it's easy to find mincemeat pies still made with beef suet and a small amount of minced meats (usually beef). All-vegetarian mincemeat pies are readily available as well, especially if you purchase a premade jar of mincemeat filling....

I'm a fanboy so here is Max Miller to provide a historical mincemeat recipe with meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRH5DODIgE0

Peter, though mincemeat pies actually made with beef haven't crossed your path, once upon a time they certainly did and some are probably still out there.

Of course, that's why the non-meat Christmas sweetie has that confusing name, though we call them mince pies. (the filling is not meat and it's not minced).

Minced meat pies are popular - to avoid confusion here - a pie with a filling of minced meat. Served as a savoury!!.But they're not a Christmas tradition, unlike mince pies which we usually only see at Christmas time, and the linked article was about Christmas traditions.

My mum regularly made a minced beef and onion pie, and by co-incidence on Saturday The Daily Telegraph published a recipe for a minced beef and onion pie - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-dr ... ana-henry/

[Jenise]

Peter, regardless of the separation now between non-meat sweet pies and spicy minced meat pies of the type you provided a link to (I'm quite familiar with the Tortiere, popular in Canada, same idea but made with pork), I was simply providing evidence that once upon a time sweet, spicy meat pies existed in your country--since you have "never known them to contain shredded beef".

by co-incidence on Saturday The Daily Telegraph published a recipe for a minced beef and onion pie - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-dr ... ana-henry/

Arghh! That sounded interesting but it is behind a paywall and not interested in subscribing to the Telegraph to find out if I was right!

Jenise

Crossed wires here it seems. As I said in my original post

It's a bit vague - when does 'traditional' refer to

-since you have "never known them to contain shredded beef".

Quite true. I have never known them, i.e. in my lifetime. And my mother hadn't either which means more than 100 years - not for the Christmas treat. I am not saying they never had in the distant past, that's why they're called mince pies.

I understood that people returning from the crusades brought back the fashion of cooking meat with dried fruit, that's a long time ago. The Christmas mince pie does not contain shredded meat.

The basic British 'curry' of the 60s would have sultanas in with the meat. The South African Bobotie has dried apricots with the minced meat,usually lamb but I had a delicious ostrich meat one on my last visit

by co-incidence on Saturday The Daily Telegraph published a recipe for a minced beef and onion pie - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-dr ... ana-henry/

Arghh! That sounded interesting but it is behind a paywall and not interested in subscribing to the Telegraph to find out if I was right!

Sorry about that, Bill. I didn't know.

I've PM'd you

I make (sweet) mincemeat pies once or twice a year using the jarred Nonesuch Classic Original Mincemeat as a filling, which does contain a small amount of meat. I love 'em.