A bit of my heritage

I like mincemeat pie, a taste I think I got from my Pennsylvania-born dad. My mother, Texan to the marrow, couldn't abide it. Daddy also liked cheddar cheese with hot apple pie. I prefer ice cream on my pie, or just plain, but I wouldn't pass up cheese and hot pie.

Then, there's ketchup with scrambled eggs. Long before picante became a college cafeteria staple, some of us who gathered around the communal breakfast table would put ketchup on our eggs. A friend, who did so also, proclaimed he could always tell who had a Yankee parent because of this. In our small group, the typecasting worked, but I don't know if it would on a larger scale.

But back to mincemeat. From the ubiquitous store-bought jar, I'm sorry to say, it's not very good. As to the dried stuff--do they even still make that? But I hadn't a clue how to make my own until I practically fought thirty years ago for the last piece at a friend's house with the maker of the pie. I was the guest. I might have been rude, but really, as the host, shouldn't he have relinquished that piece to me? He didn't. We split it, and I asked for the recipe.

It was made, he said, with green tomatoes. Oh, fine. Give with one hand, take back with the other. Green tomatoes are not an impossibility to find (fried green tomatoes being a Southern delicacy), but they're a bit of a specialty item. The best way to get them is to grow your own.

We've grown tomatoes for years. Some years, the crop was bumper and we had enough to splurge on the fried variety, harvesting before the promise of ripeness. The spouse isn't fond of this, preferring his red and sliced on the plate. So, I'd bide my time until the fall and pounce on the leftovers.

This year, our three tomatoes plants grew tall and full. They were watered and fed. They yielded very few tomatoes. But instead of pulling them up in August, I left them, hoping they might yet redeem themselves. Yesterday, with a freeze bound to be on the way and a spouse intent on a day of yard work, I went to pull them up and add them to the compost pile. There, under all the light-greenery, I found green tomatoes. Six pounds of green tomatoes.

My recipe calls for three pounds, so this morning I dispatched half of them to the mincemeat realm. I'm not sure what I'll do about the others. Mincemeat is labor intensive and since it has a very small familial audience (me, my father-in-law, a sister-in-law), I'll probably only use the 4 quarts it yielded. At that, one jar broke in the water bath and I'm down to three. (As an aside, I've never had a jar break thus.) So, I have enough for a Christmas pie, filling for cinnamon rolls, perhaps mincemeat cookies or a cake.

That's another recipe from a friend. But since there always seems to be lots of cake, I have yet to fight with her over the last piece.