Royal pastry chefs reveal mince pie recipes for Buckingham Palace (2024)

FAQs

What was the unusual pie served to royalty? ›

According to lore (and the Reading Museum), for one meal, King Henry I ate lampreys to such excess that he died. In 1977, lampreys were provided for a pie made for Queen Elizabeth II's 25th Jubilee.

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.

Mince pies have been eaten as part of a traditional British Christmas since at least the 16th century. Then they were made of a spiced, sweet minced meat mixture (often lamb), but they are now commonly made with sweet mincemeat, a mixture of dried fruits, sugar, spices, and brandy.

By the 18th century it was more likely to be tongue or even tripe, and in the 19th century it was minced beef. It was not until the late Victorian period and early 20th Century that mince pies dropped the meat and had all fruit fillings (albeit with suet). Even today there are traditions associated with mince pies.

Lamprey pie is a pastry dish made from sea lampreys or European river lampreys. Lampreys were a delicacy for the wealthy in medieval England and were often given as gifts to royalty as a means of seeking favour. It became tradition for the city of Gloucester to give the monarch a lamprey pie each Christmas.

The Guinness world record for the most expensive pie cost customers to the Fence Gate Inn, Lancashire, UK £8,195 (then $14,260) or £1,024 (then $1,781) per slice when ordered by eight guests on 14 November 2005.

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.

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.

The contrast between a Scotch pie to other mince pies is the cake, called "boiling water cake". It's more similar to a covering as opposed to a flaky cake, which means it very well may be shaped to frame the particular round with straight sides.

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.

Why do mince pies have no meat? ›

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?

Mincemeat pie is a dish that isn't very common in the American kitchen, which can lead to some confusion for cooks, even those on the Allrecipes staff.

These were nothing like our mince pies of today. They were large, seriously large, and oblong as they were designed to serve a number of people. The pastry case, called a coffin, was just a container for the delicious filling and was never meant to be eaten – well not by the rich!

Mince pies might seem like a funny name as they don't actually contain meat but this is because the recipe has changed over the past few centuries. The crumbly treats first appeared in the early middle ages, filled with a mixture of finely minced meat, chopped up fruit and a preserving liquid.

In medieval England, they were called pyes, and instead of being predominantly sweet, they were most often filled with meat — beef, lamb, wild duck, magpie pigeon — spiced with pepper, currants or dates.

In a very poignant moment of the show our heroine Sookie, after her beloved grandmother's death, sits and grieves, eating half of a creamy pecan pie. It was the last food her gran had baked.

The famous Milk Bar "Crack Pie" shall henceforth be known as "Milk Bar Pie," after the name of the pie was slammed in a column published by the "Boston Globe." In a letter published on the Milk Bar website Monday, pastry chef Christina Tosi announced that her company had changed the name of the pie.

The dish is said to have originated in honor of the night that Tom Bawco*ck, a 16th-century Mousehole folk hero, sailed out to fish, despite dangerous storms.

The "gala pie" is a variety of pork pie where the filling includes a proportion of chicken and a hard-boiled egg (also known as a Grosvenor pie). Gala pies are often baked in long, loaf-type tins, with multiple eggs arranged along the centre.