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

FAQs

What is the best mince pie for 2023? ›

Without a shadow of a doubt, Waitrose's No. 1 Brown Butter Mince Pies with Cognac are the taste-tested mince pie winner for Christmas 2023, tied with Patisserie Valerie Mince Pies.

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.

Aldi Holly Lane Deep-filled Mince Pies 6 Pack

The mincemeat has a forgettable flavour and is unevenly filled but the pastry is worse as it is hard and claggy. Aldi's mince pies may be cheap but they are far from memorable and among the worst in this test.

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.

Going on to how one should formally eat a mince pie, she explains: 'One would pick up the mince pie with a thumb and first finger, and lift [it] away from the plate. 'The mince pie is crumbly, so make sure anything that falls from the mince pie falls onto your plate.

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.

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.

What were mince pies originally called? ›

The earliest reference to a small mince pie as a 'minst pye' rather than a chewet occurs in a recipe from 1624, called 'For six Minst Pyes of an Indifferent Bigness'. It's hard to know exactly when meat stopped being included in the mince pie.

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.

Get ahead: Freeze uncooked pies in their tins for up to three months, wrapped in clingfilm. Bake from frozen as in step 4, allowing 5min extra. Or, pack cooked pies (without icing sugar) into freezerproof boxes. Freeze for up to three months.

3. Apple. There are five states they prefer apple pie to other flavors.

The Kirkland signature mince pies from Costco.

The clear winner for the United States as a whole was (not surprisingly) apple pie with more than 27% of sales going to the traditional flavor.