The shops may have started stocking Spring fashion, but I don’t give up so easily. While it’s still Winter, I intend to milk the weather for what it’s worth and bake as much as possible. Make hay while the sun does not shine so strongly, so to speak. Once Summer slips along in it’s lazy sandals, I’ll be tossing salads and using the oven solely as extra storage space.

Meanwhile, here is a tale of two tarts. Well, one is a pie really, but if we nitpick, I won’t have a good title to start the ball rolling with.

The first is a set of mince tarts. Historically speaking, these tarts are meant to contain minced meat, with dried fruit being included as a sort of filler. Over time, it appears to have evolved to the fruit based tarts we are more familiar with. And when making tarts these days, it’s easy enough to buy a jar of fruit mince from the supermarket, but I thought it would be interesting to have a completely home-made tart.

My only criteria when looking for a recipe was that it had to be a suet-free mince because I’m not a big fan of suet. It’s a bit too cloying for me, and there’s nothing worse than having to clean and grate the suet. My friend Cathy can vouch for that, when we once made a large batch of traditional christmas puddings. (She even offered Nicole $200 to eat a thumb-sized piece of raw suet. $200 out-of-pocket later, she should have realised not to challenge someone who grew up in a house with three brothers and who is probably immune to all sorts of gross dares. Nicole tucked into the suet like it was candy).

But back to the recipe. Although I like the look of Nigella Lawson’s “How to be a Domestic Goddess”, the book rarely gets used because I usually end up with varying degrees of success… or un-success. This recipe however looked very promising. It’s called “Hettie Potter’s Suet-free Mincemeat”. With a cool name like that, Hettie sounded like someone who would know a thing or two about fruit mince! Along with sliced Granny Smith apples, spices and the usual raisins and currants, I also included some dried cherries and lashings of Calvados. All the ingredients were placed in a pot and simmered gently to a resulting moist and spicy mixture. Easy peasy, with satisfying end results.

And while there are many traditions attached to the making or eating of mince tarts that we don’t abide by nowadays, there’s one little rule that I’m happy enough to retain – that is, you should always enjoy a mince tart in silence.