A mincemeat reunion

Family gathers in Springdale to make holiday classic

By Sharon Nesbit

The Gresham Outlook, Nov 21, 2009

Jim Clark / The Outlook

Rich and John Kerslake agree that making mincemeat got easier when they got rid of the hand-cranked meat grinder.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Mincemeat. Another of those holiday foods you love to hate.

This is the latest in The Outlook’s exploration of interesting Christmas foods. Last year we ate lutefisk with members of Trinity Lutheran Church. We have been to a family sausage stuffing fest. Several years ago we had a fruitcake contest. And we have eaten a totally white meal involving potato sausage, cream gravy and potatoes.

Now, for mincemeat.

“It’s psychological,” says John Kerslake, who is in his garage in Springdale, bundled against the cold, grinding 30 pounds of beef and venison. “If you just call it mince pie the kids will eat it. The minute they know there is meat in the pie, they won’t touch it.”

Every two or three years Alice Kerslake’s children – Kerslake, his brother, Rich, his sister, Jean, and their spouses – gather to make Alice’s mincemeat. It takes all day, a lot of ingredients and a lot of guessing and tasting and arguing.

It’s a family reunion with cooking involved. Nostalgia laced with raisins and cinnamon. And the result – if you like mincemeat – is a rich and spicy pie filling. It may have started as a meat pie back in the 15th century, but with the addition of sugar and brandy, mincemeat began to evolve into a dessert pie favored in Victorian England. Our ancestors hauled it to this continent from England, adding venison, their withered winter apples and candied fruit.

The Kerslakes have lived at Springdale for a long time and Northway Road is their stomping grounds. Grandpa Allan B. Kerslake was a woods boss on Larch Mountain until he bought acreage in Springdale shortly after the turn of the century.

His son, Allan R. (Bob), was a high climber before he began taking care of the county roads in Corbett. He married Alice McMannamay in 1925. Three of their four surviving children (an infant died at birth) still live right there. Brother Harold divides his time between Springdale and Alaska.

Before Alice Kerslake died in 1994, her children knew they had to get her mincemeat recipe down.

“She cooked with a little dump of this and a little dump of that,” says her daughter, Jean Rhodes (husband Jim is busy cleaning apples to go into the grinder).

“I wrote it all down and made up a recipe, and the next year we took it with us to help her make mincemeat and she said, ‘Oh, it isn’t anything like that.’ ”

These days Jean and her sisters-in-law, Mitzie and Dorothy, mix it all up, and then, as the mixture cooks, rely on the boys, Rich and John, to taste test it to make sure it matches Alice’s recipe.

1 | 2 Next Page >>