Throughout the month of November, the Fredericksburg Free Press will be highlighting some of the recipes sent in to the Rappahannock Recipe Roots project, a digital archive that features recipes, photos, memories and foodways from our collective kitchens.
The project is a partnership between the Fredericksburg Area Museum, Rappahannock Goodwill Industries and the Fredericksburg Free Press. We invite all our readers to upload a contribution to help grow the community cookbook. It’s a modern way to blend the old with the new, preserving culinary traditions while sharing our unique tastes and stories, and cultivate connections within our community.
Below, Susan Scott Neal shares her story of a family favorite: green tomato mincemeat preserves.
Mama’s Green Tomato Mincemeat
Source: Susan Scott Neal, on behalf of my mother, Isabel Dickinson Scott
My mama would be so proud.
I am so proud.
I look at the eight little pint jars on my kitchen counter and marvel that I produced what’s in them—green tomato mincemeat, an old-fashioned preserve that my mother used to make from a recipe handed down from her own mother.
Making it myself for the first time put me in touch with my mother, Isabel Dickinson Scott, who died last year.
And it linked me to a grandmother I never knew, but for whom I was named, Susan Harris Willis Dickinson. She died in 1934 when my mother was only 14 years old.
Isabel Dickinson Scott
Their mincemeat, a sweet and spicy concoction that doesn’t contain any meat, has been a favorite family dessert for decades, baked in a double-crust pie and served warm with vanilla ice cream on the side.
Oh, my goodness.
My mother hadn’t made the mincemeat in many years because of declining health, but she’d canned so much of it that we could always find a jar in the pantry when we wanted to make a pie.
But when she moved to an assisted-living facility, my sister, Sarah Williams, and I discarded a batch of home-canned jars whose contents had grown dark and threatening.
Finally, there was no more mincemeat.
Sarah makes our mother’s bread and butter pickles, but neither of us had ever considered making the mincemeat.
We’d seen often enough what a time-consuming job it was—all that chopping, and all that stirring to keep it from scorching on the bottom.
But after Mama’s death, I thought longingly of the green tomato mincemeat, wishing for just one more jar for a pie.
I tried a couple of store-bought mincemeats, but they were either too sweet or too bland. They just didn’t taste right.
I wanted my mother’s mincemeat.
Then came the day last fall when I found the handwritten recipe on a piece of paper tucked inside my mother’s battered, red-and-white checked 1946 Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book.
I knew even before I read the title that it was the treasured recipe for mincemeat.
The yellowed paper was splattered with brown spots, and I could just picture it lying on the counter beside the stove and the burbling, spewing pan of mincemeat.
I was so thrilled to find the recipe that I made two copies of the original to frame, brown splotches and all. I gave one to Sarah for Christmas last year and hung the other on my kitchen wall. The original is tucked away for safekeeping.
Sometime later, I was examining my grandmother’s 1925 Rumford Complete Cook Book. Every available space in that cookbook is covered with a handwritten recipe or clipping that she pasted onto the page.
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Faded and yellowed, the recipes present a jumble to the eyes, so I pulled out a magnifying glass and a good light. Among the recipes added to the inside front cover, one newspaper clipping was pasted upside down.
It was the very same recipe for green tomato mincemeat that I’d found in my mother’s handwriting.
The old family mincemeat recipe came from a newspaper!
I’d like to think it was published in The Free Lance-Star or its predecessor, but I’ll never know.
Eugenia Richards of Fort Myers, Fla., is the only one of my mother’s five sisters who is still living, and she says she vaguely remembers helping stir when her mother made mincemeat.
As farm girls, the six sisters always had chores in the kitchen and garden. Their father owned and ran a large dairy farm in the Chancellor area of Spotsylvania County, and the females in the family prepared a big midday meal for the farmhands.
All of the sisters said Eugenia got away without doing much in the kitchen because her parents thought she was delicate, so it’s likely that all she did was stir.
The rest of the girls may have been more involved in helping their mother make mincemeat.
I think my mother and Aunt Julia were the only ones who made it themselves once they were grown.
A lot of traditional mincemeat recipes actually call for meat, either ground beef, suet or beef tongue.
My mother’s is a meatless recipe, a late-summer project designed to make use of those small, end-of-season tomatoes still on the vine.
And, for the record, they were “to-mah-toes” in this mincemeat, “to-mah -toes” sliced on a platter or enjoyed on a sandwich.
We never ate “to-may-toes.”
My mother typically just walked outside to her garden for green tomatoes, exactly as her mother did.
I went to the farmers market.
For $1.50 a pound, I bought 13 pounds of small green tomatoes from the nice ladies at C&T Produce. It took three of us to guess how many I’d need for the 4 quarts of sliced tomatoes required by the recipe.
We’ve been eating a lot of fried green tomatoes since then, because it turned out 6 pounds would have been plenty.
The recipe calls for 2 quarts of sliced, tart apples. Since I wanted to make the mincemeat as authentically as possible, I discounted Granny Smith apples because they wouldn’t have been available back in my grandmother’s day.
Indeed, she probably gathered an unknown variety of apple from her own tree.
The folks at C&T suggested either Rome, McIntosh, Stayman or York.
I found 3-pound bags of McIntosh at the grocery store and bought two. One would have been enough.
The vinegar, spices and raisins required for the mincemeat were easy to come by, and I found the currants fairly quickly along with other dried fruits in the grocery store.
But the candied citron was elusive at this time of year. Citron is a tropical citrus fruit whose claim to fame is its use in fruitcake.
“No, we don’t get that in until holiday time,” was the report I got from Ukrop’s, Giant Food and Food Lion.
Fortunately, the Pantry Shelf, a natural food store on Sophia Street, had some left over from last year. All I needed was 4 tablespoons.
Next came the hunt for pint-sized canning jars. Two grocery stores were sold out, but I found several boxes still on the shelf at Roses Department Store.
Not having any idea how many jars I’d need, I bought three boxes–24 jars. Ha! My mother and grandmother were probably laughing out loud from their heavenly perch.
I set aside a whole day to make this mincemeat, because that’s what my mother did.
The recipe says to “boil slowly until tomatoes are tender and mincemeat is thick and not watery.” But how long would that take, I wanted to know. Two hours? Three? I had no idea.
But I had faith.
Alone in my kitchen, I sliced and chopped and peeled and stirred and stirred and stirred some more. It was one of the most satisfying days I’ve spent in a long time.
When the spicy, vinegary aroma of the simmering mincemeat filled the air, I was transported back to my mother’s kitchen on a hot summer’s day.
I tended the pan of mincemeat with fascination, watching with a feeling akin to reverence as the mishmash of chopped fruit and spices darkened and thickened into the rich concoction I remembered.
After four hours of cooking, it looked and tasted just like Mama’s.
And when the tops on the eight little pint jars began to pop, indicating they were sealed, I shared my mother’s pleasure at the success of the job.
“There goes another one,” she’d call out with a smile.
I haven’t made a pie yet. The jars of mincemeat are still sitting on my counter because I’m not finished admiring them.
“Aren’t they pretty?” my mother always said. “They’re too pretty to put away.”
My sister and I always chuckled.
But now, I completely understand.
I’m a third-generation mincemeat maker.
