These are our best mince pie recipes for Christmas 2023 (2024)

FAQs

How many mince pies should you eat on the 12 days of Christmas? ›

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.

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.

As they are home-made they do not keep quite as long as commercial mince pies and we suggest that you keep them in an airtight container for up to one week.

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.

In the US pumpkin pie is the tradition at Thanksgiving Dinner. At Christmas the favorite pie is mincemeat pie or sweet potato pie.

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.

Mince pies were always a festive pie and eaten around Christmas time. Other names for mince pies include 'mutton pie', 'shrid pie' and 'Christmas pie. ' What has changed dramatically is the mince pie recipe, having begun as savoury pies filled with minced meat, suet, dried fruits, spices cloves and nutmeg.

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 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.

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.

Do you eat mince pies hot or cold? ›

Serving to Impress

Many people enjoy mincemeat pie served warm, but it can also be served cold. The recipe below features both mini pies or you can make two nine-inch pies. You can pair mincemeat pie with ice cream, custard, or low-fat Greek yogurt for a sweet treat that's sure to impress!

The colour change in mince does not mean that the meat is old or stale. The minced meat remains safe to eat as long as it has been correctly refrigerated and consumed by the use-by date on the package.

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.

Mince pies may have disappeared from the American table, but England, the ancestral home of the mince pie, is still mince pie nation, especially at holiday time. The same goes for its expats, too.

At Christmas, the whole country loves to indulge in a mince pie or two. This jolly treat causes a festive frenzy, with nearly 800 million mince pies consumed over the year!

Back in the day it was thought lucky to eat one mince pie on each of the twelve days of Christmas. How many mince pies are eaten in the UK every Christmas? According to Good Housekeeping nearly 800 million mince pies are eaten in the UK each year. Can you eat a cold mince pie?

Mince pie: A couple of these will count as a fruit portion. But this isn't the wisest idea, given that this also amounts to around 520 calories, half your daily saturated fat limit and 40 per cent of the total sugars you should eat a day.