Most Brits associate mincemeat with Christmas – its intoxicating mix of fruit, spices, booze, nuts and mixed peel provide Pavlovian stimuli, stirring memories of cherubic choirs a-caroling, roasted poultry, and the Queen’s speech – whereas I associate it with Easter, because it was always around then that we finally ran out of mince pies. I use the term “ran out” quite deliberately, as mince pies were the kind of thing that, growing up, were considered within the realm of “supplies”, so numerous were they. Every year in early December, my industrious mother would make at least six, but often as many as ten, dozen individual mince pies, fashioned lovingly from homemade mincemeat she had prepared several months in advance.

These seasonal confections then proceeded to appear on the table each and every mealtime, during tea breaks, whenever we had company over and any other time people were sat sitting and might be persuaded to have a smackerel of something, until everyone was thoroughly sick of the sight of them. Towards the end of March, the sight of the poor, battered-looking stragglers, that had been taken in and out their box so many times that their pastry shells were all dented and crumbly, was particularly sad.

The derivation of the word mincemeat, which today contains no minced meat, is Medieval, from a time shortly after Marco Polo had returned from the East, and every cook worth his salt was finding new ways to disguise and preserve rotten provisions with the spices he popularized. Adding cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves to ground meat, dried fruits, candied peel and chopped nuts before soaking the whole lot in high octane liquor must have been a hit at the time, which probably speaks more to the concurrent lack of fresh meat than to whether this was, in fact, a delicious preparation. Either way, it caught the imagination of a nation, and though the ground meat has largely been dropped, the tradition of using these spices to perfume pie filling continues strongly.

Another reason mincemeat was such a hit way back when is because once made, it can be expected to keep, unrefrigerated for as long as 2 years – something my mother bore in mind, as she often made hers over the first weekend of the New Year giving it ample time to “improve” over the next 12 months. Throughout the year, she would occasionally rouse it from its slumbers, turning it over and adding a touch more brown sugar or booze as she deemed necessary. Suffice it to say that by the time Easter came around, and the last mince pies were served, their mincemeat contents was nearing its second birthday, and was so highly perfumed that to inhale deeply close to a warmed mincer was to risk singed nose hairs.

Following my mother’s established tradition, I was well prepared, having put together my mincemeat last January, and fed it occasionally throughout 2011, so that it was rich and boozy by the time the Holidays arrived. Unfortunately, the energetic screams of our firstborn put paid to any intentions I may have had of making batches of personal mince pies before Christmas, so I had plenty of mincemeat leftover to ring in the New Year with. Inspired by a desire to produce something that people would actually eat before the next Christian festival hove into view, I quickly prepared this mincemeat stuffed quince. You could quite equally pair it with a vanilla custard/creme anglaise or, as I prefer, a whisky-laced whipped cream, but I lost my dander somewhere along the way and just shook some powdered sugar over it to evoke the wintry season instead.

I could have used apples in this recipe, but opted for quince largely because it’s one of those fruits that was, coincidentally, first popularized in the UK during Elizabethan times and has, rather sadly, since fallen out of favor. Brought originally from Asia and sometimes known by the moniker “love apple”, quince isn’t dissimilar in taste and texture to the apple — to which it is botanically related and which would make a fine substitute here — but when you’ve got the strains of “Good King Wencelas” with its frosty and feudal lyrics echoing in your mind, quince just feels right. [For more on quince, check out our friend Rachel Eats.]

Oven-baked quince are really, really good: rich, almost custardy in flavor and not overly sweet. A perfect dessert for the Holiday period, providing enough time is taken between courses. It’s probably not worth making a batch of mincemeat just for this purpose, but they are they dead easy and quick to pull together, and will be eaten in no time, allowing you and your family to leave Yuletide flavors safely behind you before the end of January.

During the cook-a-thon that was the weekend before Christmas, in which my wife and I got our first real glimpse of just how hard professional chefs have to work, I turned out something of a rarity for me, and thus far, unique to this blog – a dessert. Touring the food blogosphere (hmm, starting to dislike that word almost as much as the word “foodie”), we notice that there are a lot of bakers out there with all kinds of recipes for coconut cake, brownies, muffins, crumbles, brittles and pies, in sharp contrast to our savory-only approach. The reason is that neither my wife nor I are hugely into sweets. I mean, we like them, but the prospect of making a cake and eating the whole things ourselves is off-putting because we know we’ll be sick of it after a couple of slices. For example, a month or so ago, I was craving muffins one Sunday and so I made a dozen cranberry muffins. I ate two that day and recently found the rest of them sporting blue and green hair styles that would have made the Sex Pistols jealous as they moldered away in a cake tin.

So, I must tell you that I am not the world’s best baker, which I hope is of some consolation to the food fans among you who daren’t bake because it seems too daunting a prospect. And, on the few occasions I do get my dander up and decide it’s time to butcher another recipe my mother could have turned out perfectly in her sleep, it is often bread (I refer to my comments about the lack of good bread in America below), and sometimes scones or muffins. Only very, very occasionally, will I try a pie or a tart. In fact, I think the last time I made a pie was about six months ago. It was a French apple tart and I made it with no rolling pin, no spatula and no oven, and the pain of making it has put me off trying another dessert since. (Needless to say, said tart had more in common visually with the face of a particularly zitty teenager than the recipe I was following.) But this past weekend, full of the festive spirit, and perhaps a couple of lunchtime sherries, I decided that since we were up to our elbows in eggs and flour (for the pasta) I might as well make a pie.

Riffing off the recipe for the French apple tart, (but replete with the right tools for the job this time), I skipped the apples and replaced them with a chestnut puree that I’d found at the supermarket in a dusty old can and bought on impulse. I always associate chestnuts with Christmas whether they’re in a stuffing, simply fire-roasted and cracked with a glass of sherry, or used in desserts because to me they impart one of the signature scents of the season. Real bakers, if you’ve bothered reading this far, feel free to smirk, or even guffaw, because all this really was was a pasty crust slathered with pastry cream (similar to a creme anglaise, or to you British readers, just vanilla custard), and then topped with the chestnut puree and finished with a shake of powdered sugar. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the sliced tart, so I’ve made a really weak attempt to recreate it in cross-section in photoshop (see above). Honestly though, in a season when a lot of desserts are heavy, full of seasoned, dried fruits, candied ginger and other spices, this one, if not exactly light given the butter and eggs, is clean-tasting, simple and straight-forward to prepare, and, perhaps most importantly to me, was widely acknowledged to be a success, which increases the chances that I’ll make it again some time. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

For the sweet pastry dough:
1/2 cup (4oz) room temperature unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2 cups of all-purpose (plain) flour, sifted
1 whole egg
1/2 cup confectioner’s (icing) sugar
1/8 tsp baking powder

For the pastry cream/custard:
2 cups whole milk
1 vanilla bean or 2-3 tsp of vanilla essence
1/3 cup plus 1 tbsp plain flour, sifted
1/2 cup granulated white sugar
6 to 8 tablespoons of chestnut puree

4 egg yolks

Recipe:
For the pastry:

For the pastry cream/custard::

Assembling it:

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