Christmas Pies

Christmas Pies  Between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas falls the deer hunting season in our state of Pennsylvania. The first day of buck hunting has been a holiday for school kids who want to join in the hunt. My mother-in-law always relied on someone in the family to harvest a deer so she could claim some of the fat, tallow, and bits of the venison to make the filling for her mince meat pies. She would bake the meat pies for the Christmas holiday meals. She would occasionally use beef products to make the filling for her pies if no venison was available, but that was something she would only do reluctantly.
Usually my brother or I would get either a buck or a doe or both. We frequently hunted together with our father and usually managed to bring down at least one deer and quite often more than one among the three of us. We didn’t allow any of the deer meat to go to waste. We would harvest as many deer as we had licenses. Our families liked the flavor of venison.
After we would spend hours in the outdoors hunting 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 of 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 all the meat from the deer that we had turned in to the butcher. We also did not like that butchers used band saws to cut through the brittle deer bones, splintering them and leaving slivers of bone and grit 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 had learned the basic skills for cutting up meat and it was only a small step from that to actually butchering the deer for ourselves. Our father had a garage/ shed at the back of his property. We would skin the deer and allow it 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 that a professional butcher. We would first cut around the bones and remove them before slicing the meat. All that was left for us to cut was 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 save 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 cooked, 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.