There’s nothing like the smell and taste of warm mince pies, fresh from the oven. The familiar, festive harmonies of cinnamon and dried fruit, the sickly sweet base notes of sugar, the zing of orange peel on your tongue (and somewhere in your nose for several hours after), and the warm hug that is gently browned shortcrust pastry. Mince pies are, for me at least, the quintessential Christmas food. Christmas just isn’t Christmas unless there are mince pies. And when I say ‘there’s nothing like the smell and taste of warm mince pies”, in Mumbai’s case, I mean it literally. Because mince pies (as I know and love them) are not available. Except in my kitchen, baked in my oven.
What is it about me and foods which are only available and acceptable at certain times of year? Why do I get such a kick out of them, why do I rely so heavily on them to create the correct seasonal ambiance and why, oh why, do I live in places which make the struggle to acquire these foods so, so much bigger than it needs to be? If you’re interested to know just how hot and cross I get around Easter, you can read here.
Fortunately, I have been making multiple batches of mince pies every year since I was about 8 years old (which is many, many more years of training than I have on hot cross buns which I have only attempted to make about 3 times in my life). One Christmas while home from university, my holiday job was with a caterer and saw my boss and me producing over 500 of the things for various corporate events and (lazy, in my opinion) private hosts. As a veteran of the mince pie making industry I am, therefore, less phased by sub-standard ingredients and can make substitutions and adjustments on the fly. I can master a new oven (or toaster oven, as was the case in Yangon), and I can even adapt my pastry rolling style to accommodate a loss of power as a result of a recent C-section (for Jasper’s first Christmas in 2020). I am quite confident that provided I had flour, butter and some mincemeat, I could make a passable mince pie on a camp stove.
And so, for those of you who have tried and enjoyed a mince pie or two of mine, and who are eager to know the secret behind them, here are a couple of recipes that might help you kick-start your festive preparations for 2024.
Ordinary Mince Pies
Preparation Time: 30 minutes. Cooking time: 15 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius.
Make your shortcrust pastry using a ratio of half fat (refrigerated, unsalted butter) to flour (plain, sieved). Cube the butter and rub it into the flour with your hands until you have a breadcrumb-like consistency. Slowly add some water, a tablespoon at a time, while squoodging the mix, until the breadcrumbs turn to a dough. Around 600g flour to 300g butter will make about 12 mince pies (depending on your rolling skills and the size of your muffin/ cupcake/ pie tin).
Dust your cleaned work surface with flour and plonk your pastry onto it. Putting some more flour on your rolling pin, start to roll your pastry as flat, wide and thin as you dare.
Find two cookie cutters, one smaller than the other. In the absence of cookie cutters, use glasses, or bowls, or the lid off a jar, and cut the same number of pie bottoms (the larger ones) and pie tops (the smaller ones).
Assemble your pies in the tin by placing a pie bottom, a dollop of Robertsons mincemeat (which you probably have left over from last year), and a pie top into each space on your baking tray. Attempt to seal the edges of each one without deforming them. Get as creative as you like with holly leaves and miniature snowmen made from your leftover pastry trimmings, or simply stab your pies with a fork to help prevent them bubbling over at the edges you’ve failed to seal properly.
Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown.
Sprinkle with icing sugar snow, slather with brandy butter or brandy cream and enjoy, politely refusing to drive anywhere on account of the healthy volume of alcoholic dairy accompaniments you have just consumed.
Photo: Mince Pies - Batch of 2022.
Mumbai Mince Pies
Preparation Time: 5.5 months. Cooking Time: 15 minutes. Food miles: Many.
Don’t preheat your oven just yet, we are only in July. Yes, you heard that right, July. For guaranteed success, July is the month when the Mumbai mince pie prep begins.
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Variation 1: Hand-carried mincemeat
Start sending out feelers for any potential visitors from the UK to Mumbai between now and the end of the year. Contact them with your request for a mule to bring you some mincemeat. Robertsons if possible, but in the event the shelves in the UK are not yet stocked with Christmas ingredients, settle for a supermarket own brand and remind yourself to comment on how different it tastes to Robertsons every time you offer someone a mince pie 5.5 months from now.
Await arrival of your mincemeat. And your friend/ relative/ mule, of course. I am sure you’re looking forward to seeing them too. As long as they remember the mincemeat.
Variation 2: British Corner Shop
If nobody is willing or able to hand carry your mince meat, head on over to British Corner Shop and set yourself an alert to be notified when their Christmas stock becomes available for worldwide shipping.
Start saving up: both for the customs fee to bring your goods into India and for all the other items you will end up adding to your basket when you see what other essential items are also available to be shipped to your doorstep. (Not to mention the ‘gift’ the postman will undoubtedly ask for when he delivers your parcel).
Await delivery of your Christmas-in-a-box and marvel at all the items you had totally forgotten you had bought and which undoubtedly made up the bulk of your 20kg survivors pack. Locate the mincemeat and thank the universe for the British Corner Shop and for Robertsons.
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Finally, it’s late-November and you have around 2 weeks to identify and purchase a good quality, weevil-free plain flour (I use maida, which is the processed, refined, nutrient-less powder that most baked goods brands are positioned vehemently against. ‘No Maida!’, ‘Maida free!’, 'Whole grain goodness!' cry colourful snack packs, dense sourdough loaves and extremely dry biscuits. If the lack of wholegrain goodness is the reason I have never had to throw out a batch because it has things living in it, then give me more of the refining and processing. I did once make the mistake of trying to use Atta, the grittier, tougher, insect-prone cousin of Maida which makes such delicious rotis, but I ended up with pastry I could have used as cement while raw and as a cannonball once baked, so don’t do that.)
On 1 December, switch on all the air conditioners in your home and set them all to their lowest temperature setting. Assuming, like me, you don’t have air con or sufficient bench space in your galley kitchen, you are going to need to chill the entire house and do the bulk of your mince-pie making in the living room/ dining area. It’s unlikely to be below 30 degrees outside, so ‘room temperature’ must be carefully controlled here. Remember to instruct anyone working in your house during the day (in my case a cleaner and nanny) that they must not, under any circumstances, switch off any of the cold air. Lend them sweaters.
Make your shortcrust pastry using a ratio of half fat (refrigerated, unsalted butter) to flour (maida, which probably doesn’t need to be sieved). Place your hands in the freezer for a few minutes before quickly cubing the butter and rubbing it into the flour with your newly chilled hands until you have a breadcrumb-like consistency.
Slowly add some water, a tablespoon at a time, while squoodging the mix, until the breadcrumbs turn to a dough. Quickly return your pastry to the fridge for it to harden and chill again while you prep your work area.
From here, you can follow steps 3 through 7 of the ordinary mince pies recipe, assuming you found and abused the brandy butter section on the British Corner Shop site.
Mumbai mince pies are a labour of love, but boy do they taste good after all that effort. They also come with a lot of gratitude and flattery when shared with others because most people have the good sense, restraint or lack of interest not to bother going through all this themselves.
Photo: Mince pies and birthday cake. And no, I didn't make the gingerbread men!
It’s not only mince pies which take an extraordinary amount of effort. One family favourite which would be a fridge-filling staple if we didn’t live where we live, is sausage rolls. Drowned in their respective preferred sauces of BBQ and Ketchup, Dylan and Jasper would eat sausage rolls every other night if they had the opportunity. Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise, now that I think about it, that a batch of sausage rolls takes me anywhere in the range of 1 - 4 weeks to make.
Australian sausage rolls
Preparation time: next to none. Cooking time: none.
Buy sausage roll from literally anywhere—a supermarket bakery counter, deli aisle, a hole in the wall
Enjoy sausage roll.
Talk for 3 days about how good sausage roll was.
Repeat until your digestive system suggests you should eat a vegetable.
Mumbai sausage rolls
Preparation time: 1 - 4 weeks plus 30 minutes of kitchen prep. Cooking time: 15 - 20 minutes.
Decide to make sausage rolls. (This decision may be motivated by love and wanting to do something nice for your two sausage-roll fiends. Or it may be motivated by the exasperation of discovering that the larger of the two fiends has consumed all but one of the previous frozen batch, leaving you with nothing for the nanny to feed the small one for dinner on the evening you are out late at a work function. Either way, you’ve decided to make sausage rolls.)
Buy pork mince. This is relatively easy, but gives you zero flavour, only bulk.
Look for sausages. Not frankfurters, no, keep looking. Definitely not those things they call chicken sausage which taste and look like neither chicken nor sausage and would almost certainly survive a nuclear disaster. Keep looking. You’re after sausages that have chunky, herby, unidentifiable but textured meat stuffed into a membrane. You know, like a Lincolnshire, or a Cumberland. You know, like a sausage.
Give up on looking for sausages. They haven’t been seen since around August 2023. Start looking for interesting burger patties instead. They will have to do. Pork and bacon? A winner. Lamb and rosemary? Sure, why not? Spice it up a little. Oh no, wait, this is India. Do NOT spice it up a little, or even a tiny bit. Chicken and apple? Weird, but OK.
OK - it’s been 2 weeks and you have your meat secured. Now, puff pastry. Check the freezer? Do you still have a roll in there or did you use that for puff pastry pizzas out of spite at not being able to find sausages? You did? No worries, it happens to the best of us. Re-order a couple of rolls of frozen puff pastry to arrive during the day on which you plan to cook.
Discover that only one roll has been delivered when you get home from work. Do NOT let this break you. You have already defrosted your hard-earned pork/ pork substitutes. You MUST continue on.
Panic order puff pastry from all your 15-minute delivery apps and hope that one comes through for you.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Pour and drink wine in a feeble attempt to enjoy your cooking.
Embrace windfall of puff pastry deliveries in quick succession (ignoring strange looks from delivery people lined up outside your door waving pastry at you), and store the excess in the freezer for the next time you have the energy to make sausage rolls.
Quickly defrost and then re-refrigerate the one you need for tonight.
Mix pork / not pork with some eggs and breadcrumbs (I would estimate that I use about 3 eggs and 1 cup of breadcrumbs for around 750g of meat and two packs of frozen pastry. But I never quite get the ratio of pastry to meat right and then we have spaghetti and meatballs the next day to use the leftovers.)
Spoon your mixture onto the pastry and roll up into rolls. Mould and chop into lengths and diameters of your choice and then paint with milk before putting in the oven.
Bake for 15 - 20 minutes depending on how big/ long/ fat they are/ Panic about it being pork of mixed/ unverified quality and bake for a few extra minutes to be on the safe side.
Set aside to cool as quickly as possible so that you can safely squirrel as many rolls as possible away into the freezer before your husband comes home. Lie to his face and tell him that the meagre ration left for him by your son was ‘all you had time to make’.
Finish wine and try to think of positive things about living in a country with no sausage roll culture.
Now that we are one week into our Australian holiday, we have backed off the sausage rolls temporarily (see point 4 in the Australian sausage roll recipe) but we will undoubtedly ramp back up again towards our departure date at the end of next week.
But now that Christmas is done and dusted, there is some very good news on the supermarket shelves: the HOT CROSS BUNS are back and they are selling like, well, hot cakes.
Australian Hot Cross Buns
Preparation time: how are your knife skills? Cooking time: how fast is your toaster? Buttering time: in this heat? Blink and you’ll miss it melting.
Buy hot cross buns.
Eat hot cross buns
Go and buy more hot cross buns.
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