Christmas Mince Pie Ice Cream Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the tradition of mince pies at Christmas? ›

To spread the joy, it was tradition in England that each member of the family gave the mixture a stir, while making a wish. And if you wanted to be ensure good health and happiness in the upcoming year, you should eat one mince pie every day for the Twelve Days of Christmas, from Christmas Eve until the 5th of January.

It is a Christmas Pudding, but instead of adding a lengthy list of spices, fruit, and sugars you are just adding in Mincemeat. Mincemeat, in turn, is actually made up of spices, fruit, and sugars and that is why it is a great 'substitute' in this recipe and a fantastically easy way to make this traditional dessert.

And it's all to do with showing off - as well as an old belief that they can bring you luck at this time of the year. Mince pies may have been around for centuries, but they changed beyond recognition since their first mention in records dating back to the 14th century.

Mincemeat is a combination of chopped dried fruits, spices, sugar, nuts, distilled spirits, a fat of some type and sometimes meat. The name is a carryover from 15th century England when mincemeat did indeed have meat in the mix; in fact, the whole point of mincemeat was to preserve meat with sugar and alcohol.

A mince pie (also mincemeat pie in North America, and fruit mince pie in Australia and New Zealand) is a sweet pie of English origin filled with mincemeat, being a mixture of fruit, spices and suet. The pies are traditionally served during the Christmas season in much of the English-speaking world.

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.

In American English, "mincemeat" is a sweet pie filling (I think it's mince pie in BrE) which originally contained some meat but in modern times it is generally made mostly of apples and raisins.

La bûche de Noël

The quintessential French Christmas dessert is the bûche de Noël, or the Yule or Christmas Log, a rolled cake with filling and thick icing.

Christmas Pudding (also known as plum pudding or figgy pudding) is a dish as famous as it is misunderstood.

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.

Why is the filling in a mince pie 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.

United States. American boys and girls leave milk and cookies for Santa Claus, like our Peanut Butter Blossom Cookies. Knit stockings are hung on the fireplace for Santa to stuff with small gifts—or coal for the naughty children—before he ascends back up the chimney.

Mincemeat isn't difficult to make, but it has a lot of ingredients, which can make it expensive to produce in small batches, and it requires at least a day's advance planning to let the ingredients sit.

Mince pies = eyes

This is a term used widely in London even to this day, usually to describe a girl's features. Her eyes would be described as Minces, an even more slang term from the original mince pies.

Mincemeat is essentially a mixture of chopped dried fruits, distilled spirits, a combination of spices, beef suet, and (traditionally) chopped meat which is usually used as a pie or pastry filling.

The original mince pies were oblong crib shapes decorated with a baby Jesus on top. The contents represent the gifts of the Magi to the Christ child, spices and plump middle eastern fruits. In the 1640's in England, Scotland and Ireland, the Puritans banned Christmas and everything related to the holiday.

A custom from the middle ages says that if you eat a mince pie on every day from Christmas to Twelfth Night (evening of the 5th January) you will have happiness for the next 12 months!

As the pies were often baked in a rectangular shape, people began to associate them with the manger Jesus had laid in. Soon dough effigies of the baby Jesus were placed on top of the pies to reinforce the religious connection.

/ˌmɪns ˈpaɪ/ ​a small round pie filled with mincemeat, traditionally eaten at Christmas, especially in the UKTopics Foodc2.