This recipe comes from Vegetable Cookery, one of the earliest completely vegetarian cookbooks. It was first published in periodical form in 1812, then went on to be published as a book. This recipe comes from the fourth edition published in 1833. Since the word “vegetarian” wasn’t popularized until the 1850s, Vegetable Cookery doesn’t actually use that term and refers to a “vegetable diet” instead.
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Vegetarianism has a long history in the United States, although the word “vegetarian” was not in common usage until around the 1850s. By the 1880s, vegetarian meat substitutes that were meant to mimic the look and taste of meat helped bring vegetarian foods to a wider audience, and vegetarianism was widely promoted as part of a healthy lifestyle.
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I still remember my first-ever mincemeat pie, served on Christmas Day at the Charles Dickens Museum in London. It tasted warm and Christmas-y, the perfect treat after a cold trek across the city in the snow. Since then, my mind has associated mincemeat pies with a Dickensian, Victorian Christmas – but mincemeat pies actually go back much farther than that.
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History in the Making 