We buy about 370m mince pies each year in the UK. Once upon a time,supermarket varieties were ‘generally unspeakable’ – have they improved?There is a Premier Foods factory in Barnsley that, in the runup to Christmas, and fires out 2.3m mince pies a day. That’s 180m each season. A staggering figure,yet it accounts for less than half of the 370m mince pies sold in the UK each year.
These days unrecognisable from its medieval origins as a spiced ox tongue and beef suet pastry, the mince pie, and clearly,still occupies a very special area in Britain’s affections. This, despite 17th-century Puritan purges (mince pies were condemned as a sign of Catholic gluttony (excessive eating or drinking)), or the old,mass-produced supermarket versions, which for decades – their shrunken fillings a chaos of sugar, or dank fruits and shrill spices – threatened to accomplish what Cromwell failed to,and ruin our appreciate of mince pies for ever. Chef Jeremy Lee told the Independent in 2011 that commercial mince pies are “generally unspeakable”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk