The Christmas Pie

Between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas falls deer hunting season in our state of Pennsylvania. The first day of buck hunting is an annual holiday for school kids who want to join in the hunt. My mother-in-law Retha Morrison always relied that someone would harvest a deer. Each year she’d lay claim to some of the fat, tallow, and bits of meat to make filling for her mince meat pies. She would bake several pies for the Christmas holiday meals, occasionally she’d use beef products for the filling of her pies if there wasn’t any venison available, but she’d do only reluctantly.

Usually my brother Ken or I would get either a buck or a doe or both. We frequently hunted together with our father Carl and usually managed to bring down at least one deer; quite often more than one among the three of us. We didn’t allow any of the deer meat to go to waste and we’d harvest as many deer as we had licenses. We liked the flavor of venison.

After we would spend hours in the outdoors hunting in all kinds of weather to find and kill a deer, we didn’t really want to turn our hard-earned prize over to a butcher who might or might not salvage all the meat from the carcass for us. We had heard stories about unscrupulous butchers and were worried that all of the meat from our deer might not be returned or the meat might not be handled properly or we might not get back the meat from the deer that we had turned in to the butcher. We also did not like the fact that butchers used band saws to cut through the brittle deer bones, splintering them and leaving slivers of bone and bone dust in the meat.

When we were younger, we helped our uncles and our grandfather butcher several hogs and a young bull at granddad’s farm every year. We’d learned the basic skills for cutting up meat. It was only a small step from that to actually doing the butchering for ourselves. Our father had a garage/shed at the back of his property. We’d skin the deer and allow the carcass to hang inside to cool before quartering it. Eventually we would divide and slice the meat into the desired cuts.

If we found a stray hair we knew who to blame. Our cuts of meat may not have been as fancy or as perfect as those of a professional butcher, but we would first cut around the bones to remove them before slicing the meat. What was left for us to slice was all meat.

My brother liked to divide his deer to make steaks, deer sausage, and cold pack the smaller non-descript pieces of venison. I liked to cut my deer into steaks, cold pack the smaller pieces, and make deer jerky. Usually I could collect enough meat and fat from the rib cages to give my mother-in-law enough meat to make two or more mince meat pies.

Following a recipe that she had used for years she would mix the raisins, currants, apples, citrus products, and spices together. Once they had simmered, she would put the mixture into glass jars and store them in the refrigerator until the filling was needed for the making of her pies.

It would be only one of the flavors of pie that she would bake for Christmas.