The mother of the house soaks these apples overnight, late in November, over against Thanksgiving time. The dried apples plump out again, their wrinkles and their hateful bitterness go out of them. Mother sets a stout boy to chopping them in her wooden chopping tray scored deep by bygone robust boys. This for the Indian part of the mincemeat. The boy manufactures up about a half bushel of the wild fruit.
Mother herself chops up the lean meat of the deer that father shot in the wild apple orchard—tartened by these same apples on strings—eight pounds of it. in another tray. She salts the meat well as it slowly seethes tender. She sets the boy's chopped apples on to boil for an hour on a mild stove, and in a thick iron kettle so as not to burn them. After the apples have turned into a deep brown continent, mother dowses in the cider. A cupful of it, hard, to a quart of apples. This is father's own brew, what he calls molten manhood. It comes from the same wild apples as in the kettle here.
Now this mother drains her deer meat and brings meat and apples together in a stupendous kettle of pioneer days. She puts in three pounds of raisins, all the dried currants from two currant bushes. orange peel from a month's breakfasts, and all the citron and the lemon peels she can put her hands on. She turns in four pounds of suet chopped up into a snowy froth. She stirs in half a gallon of black molasses, the kind the old West Injun slaves used to hide their master's bull-tail whip in. the kind my Uncle Frank used to say would put whiskers on your feet. (Only Uncle Frank didn't mean feet but a stronger set of things: his was New England euphemism or New England bowdlerization.)
Then with the savory mess seething like Vesuvius on the stove, mother pours back all the water the deer meat has stewed in. She stirs up her erupting volcano hard. When the mess is hot as hades and is making the house smell like paradise for four miles down-wind, mother and the boy pour the molten makings of Thanksgiving and Christmas into wooden buckets, and even into the wash tub. cover it well, to cure, and put the buckets down-cellar. The aroma of the mincemeat comes right out through the wooden staves, right up through the double pine floorboards. And the kitchen swims deep in Christmas from this day on.
When the lady of the farmhouse puts this concoction, which is massed Indians and West Indies and deer and fruit and forest, into her pie shells, she slashes the pies with the mystic iconography of old New England. It is a long barb of an Indian arrow with feathers slashed in the dough. She says such holes are for the pic to breathe through in the oven. But you must nor believe her. There is more here than a ladylike woman can tell. These chevroned lines are lines of life, and they mean man. This is strong medicine from the Indians. It also has something to do with the long arrows of wild geese going south ahead of winter, coming back north ahead of spring, with their deep bass honking about eternal life. The lady of the farm speaks in euphemisms. too.
A Christmas browned around with mince pies built of Indian apples and deer meat is a Christmas that makes the meanest mouth water and fills the hearts of even the crabbedest hired men full of peace and good will.
This goes also for deep pork-apple pie.
Other regions south or west of New England have copied our mincemeat, made it out of tame beef and tame apples, and have had quite a good Christmas for themselves. But no place I know of has ever stolen our pork-apple pie from us. It is too heavy to steal, wiseacres may say. It is more than that. It is one of our secrets, one of our powerful medicines, and I am taking my wellbeing in my hands when I talk about it. It is a lodge ritual, and one of our hidden strengths. Not many farms have pork apple pie now. But those that stiII do prosper, and the children on them run mostly to boys. And these boys are good at the bucksaw, at school, at college, at building the nation, at keeping the country fit and handsome and human.
This secret strength of ours is housed in a deep skillet, or a fry-kettle. It has to be. For it is layers on layers of surprise, delight, and robust good fillings of boys and men. The dish comes down from our pioneer ancestors. It has Miles Standish and Paul Bunyan burned into its pork chunks and welded into its proud slices of apples.
The creator of this pie for the ages and cold blue northern winters and mornings like diamonds lays down thick foundations of dough for it. She or he—for my portly Uncle Frank was the best pork-apple pie maker I ever knew and ran it up without ever dusting his vast Sunday pants, which he always wore when at this ecstasy in flour—makes a crust (hat could hold up a small boy. She makes it out of a quart of flour and a piece of lard big as a goose egg worked into the Hour by the hands. Water is put in, but only enough to nuke the dough malleable. It is rolled out flat on the breadboard. Then it is put into the deep iron dish as an upholstery.
Next, sliced raw apples arc laid in, a good layer of them, snowed over with a light dust of brown sugar. Then comes the chief secret, the holy of holies. The medicine man who was my Uncle Frank next took a piece of raw salt pork, the size of his paired big sea-captain thumbs—which may be euphemism again—four inches by three, Me cut it into chunks the size of his upper thumbs. Like all sea captains, Uncle Frank measured everything to his own body. (That's the way. come to think of it, our fathoms and feet started.) Uncle Frank put these chunks in a layer in his pie. Then he layered this layer of his dish over with another layer of sliced apples, dusted brown with more dark sugar. Then another deep secret: He poured in a pint of the thickest soured cream. The kind of cream that existed before cream separators made mince of our manhood. This Uncle Frank did when my aunt wasn't looking. It was something not for women to see, like the instrument that docs the bull-roaring in Sourh-SeaIsland male-temples. Last of all, he sprinkled the yellow velvet of the cream with deep brown cinnamon, rolled out a roof for the whole business, slashed it with the he-symbols of taur flying geese, buttered over the dough, and sloshed on a cupful of cold spring water. The cold water was Uncle Frank's bit of ritual he worked out from the fertility of his own mind, 10 make sure the baked crust would fall apart into flakes of beatitude. Then my Uncle Frank bounced his whole Tower of Babel into the oven. The grate was out, the pie filled the whole cavern of iron.
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