The Men's Baking Contest returns to the entertainment shelter at Port Perry Fair

PAUL PUCKRIN, Port Perry Agricultural Society

The ever popular Men's Only baking contest is back. The Port Perry Fair will host the contest at noon on Sunday, September 1st. The entry category this year is mincemeat/mince pie. The first-place, winner-takes-all prize is $1,000 and is open to any age.

The organizers of this event wanted to find a way to encourage men to participate in the homecraft division. To register for this event, men must register at the Entertainment Shelter on the fairgrounds at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 1st. Please indicate if any nuts are used in your entry. After the contest, the pies will be picked up and served to those in attendance.

There will also be a Women's Only baking contest on Monday, September 2nd. For more details on that event, visit the Port Perry Fair's website at www.portperryfair.com.

The history of Mincemeat Pie

Mincemeat developed as a way of preserving meat without salting or smoking, although modern mince pies contain little or no meat.

The ingredients for the modern mincemeat pie, also commonly referred to as mince pie or Christmas pie, can be traced to the return of European crusaders from the Holy Land. Middle Eastern cooking methods, which sometimes combined meats, fruits and spices, were popular then. Shrid pies (as they were known then) were formed from shredded meat, suet and dried fruit, sometimes steeped in brandy. Spices such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were added.

Mince pies were about 30 to 50 percent meat in the late Tudor era, but the meat content dwindled slowly over the next 300 years.

Mincemeat pies played a role in the history of one of England's most historic monasteries.

During Henry VIII's reign, he began phasing out Catholic properties and seizing them in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which started in 1536. Richard Whiting, the abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, tried to curb the king's greed by secretly sending a mincemeat pie containing hidden deeds to several of the abbey's costliest estates out of the country. A few of these deeds were stolen by Whiting's servant, Thomas Horner, who was immortalized for his deed in the nursery rhyme "Little Jack Horner." Despite Whiting's attempt to save it, Glastonbury Abbey was later seized by Henry, and, according to The Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Other Essays by Francis Aidan Gasquet, Whiting and two of his priests were hanged for treason.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), the self-proclaimed Lord Protector of England from 1649 until 1658, detested Christmas as a pagan custom. Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Council abolished Christmas on December 22nd, 1657. In London, soldiers were ordered to go around the streets and take, by force if necessary, food being cooked for a Christmas celebration. Cromwell considered pies as a guilty, forbidden pleasure. The traditional mincemeat pie was banned.

King Charles II (1630-1685) restored Christmas when he ascended the throne in 1660.