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SPEAKER 1: Four pounds of lean boiled beef chopped fine. Two times as much chopped tart apples. A pound of chopped suet.

LEIF ENGER: This was always Eileen [? Kerr's ?] favorite cookbook when it came to mincemeat, a collection compiled by the Lutheran women of Vasa, Minnesota, in the 1920s.

SPEAKER 1: It has recipes given by Mrs. Coolidge. Remove from the fire. And when nearly cool, add a pint of wine or fruit juice. Seal it, and it will keep all winter.

LEIF ENGER: Was Mrs. Coolidge handy at baking a mincemeat pie?

SPEAKER 1: It seems that way. The last time I made this was in 1957 when I wrote Delicious.

LEIF ENGER: Here in the [? Kerr's ?] Central Minnesota farmhouse, warm and spicy smelling, it's easy to imagine a whole countertop full of fresh mince pies. It's even easy to imagine liking mince pie, though you might never have liked it before. Here, it's possible to shut your eyes and dream the merry sounds of the Coolidge kitchen, the humming of carols, the chopping of suet, the patter of sweet, wistful ghosts. Joe Plut is a college professor just up the road in Brainerd who aches for the wine, dark pie.

JOE PLUT: Mincemeat pies and typewriters. LP records. All the things that are part of my life.

I think it's unique. It's-- there's a strongness. It's a distinct flavor. It's not in between.

I think people either love it or dislike it intensely. But there's something mysterious about it. It is disappearing. I'm really sad about that.

LEIF ENGER: Mincemeat is still a popular Christmas dish in Europe, along with its cousin suet pudding. But it's declined in America for several reasons. The invention of the deep freeze meant you no longer had to preserve meat by smoking or spicing it. People don't eat much salt pork these days either.

There's also the way a slice of mince pie looks. The filling. A somber, deep brown with strange lumps and knobs poking out from under the crust. A big piece can scare a child right out of the room.

And there are the matters of taste and smell. Muscular, sweet, suggesting orchards, grapevines, bullion, and brandy. Jerry [? Hestrin ?] runs a bakery in Pequot Lakes, but admits, poking suspiciously at a plate of mincemeat, that for him, this mixture defeats the whole purpose of eating pie, which is to taste and smell something pleasant.

SPEAKER 2: It has its own unique taste. And it's a taste that I haven't acquired a liking for. I suppose if I ate a piece every day for a month, I'd either like it or be dead at the end of the month.

LEIF ENGER: Acceptance of mincemeat was and still is much greater abroad. It's speculated the first batch was stirred up in England in the early 15th century. It was meatier then with less fruit and entree. Not a dessert. People loved it.

When Henry V was crowned in 1413, he celebrated with a slice of mincemeat pie. When the colonists arrived in the New World, mincemeat came with them. It's great traveling food because it doesn't rot. It just ferments until, as [? Hestrin ?] says, it's properly mature.

SPEAKER 2: And for those that like it, they really like it. And they'll go out of their way to get a mincemeat pie.

LEIF ENGER: Despite his own feelings on the matter, [? Hestrin's ?] bakery is one of the few hereabouts that still takes infrequent orders for mince pies. He says those customers tend to be older people. Folks like the [? Kerr's ?] who grew up with ice boxes and Booth Tarkington and horehound candy.

It's as if the mincemeat, having matured itself, requires a certain maturity of the person who eats it. A gracious willingness to decipher complex flavors. Marion Cunningham, a mincemeat lover and the author of many cookbooks, isn't sure there's enough such maturity left in this country to sustain the old concoction.

MARION CUNNINGHAM: When it's no longer relevant, and people don't even really what it is, I guess we have to give it a ceremonial burial. Maybe that's what we should be doing this Christmas, Leif. We should be having our mincemeat pie and saying goodbye.

LEIF ENGER: Yet there are those who would call such a burial premature. The people at the Borden company, for example, have no plans to stop selling their None Such brand of commercial mincemeat, even though sales keep going down. Eileen [? Kerr ?] is even now searching for a new mincemeat recipe, something that doesn't start with four pounds of beef like Mrs. Coolidge's.

Maybe we'll see a new wave of European immigrants, and suet futures will rise. After all, the poet and author E.B White once wrote that the future of America itself resembles, quote, a mince pie long in the baking. Never quite done.

You might have expected a good American like White to use apple pie in that metaphor. But he didn't. He used mincemeat. A patient old pie squatting on the back shelf, complicated, aromatic, outweighing fashion.

The humble mince we've snubbed long since, its nature doesn't suit us. But E.B White was often right. The mince might yet include us. Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.