["The Gatherer," Forty Mince Pies, from Literary California, Poetry, Prose and Portraits (1918)]

 

FORTY MINCE PIES

          I remember a season of mince-pie beside which all others pale in comparison. It was when we lived in a deep canyon of the high Sierras in Esmeralda county, Nevada, miles away from any other house; and in the long, cold winters we had to find our recreation within our own family circle. In preparing for our Christmas that year of December, 1864, my mother devoted several days to baking, while my brothers and myself danced around in delight at seeing the promised time was so near at hand.

          The usual custom is to make up a great jar of mincemeat, and use it from time to time, throughout the days succeeding the holidays. But on this occasion the winter was so bitterly cold and severe that our mother resolved to make up the entire jar at once. We had one room that the sun never touched, and it was like death to enter the place, so it served as a sort of refrigerator where the multitude of pies could be stored. I remember seeing the vision of pies there placed in orderly rows on long shelves contrived for the purpose—so many of them that just out of curiosity I counted them and found forty—forty mince pies!

          During the long solemn nights of stillness and icy chill, or of tempest howling about the house with threats of snowy

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death, or of listening to the uncanny laughter of the coyotes hunting for prey, we gathered close to the merry, crackling blaze of the stove, and told stories and riddles, and sang songs to my mother's guitar accompaniment. And then one of us would be sent into the "Greenland room", which was always in the dark, to capture a pie for the crowning of the feast. In we would fly, seize the treasure, dart out again like a hero that had dared the goblins. Placing the frozen confection between two pie-pans we would turn it over and over before the flame, and slowly upon the atmosphere would steal those delicious flavors, subtle and spicy, which belong to the mince-pie, and the mince-pie alone.

          When divided and shared, each expectant youngster would smilingly absorb the fragrant and toothsome triangle. We were hardy children—Nature adapting us to the cold, and the mince-pie seemed especially adapted to the peculiar circumstances that surrounded us. We slept soundly and peacefully after our feast, and awoke refreshed and ready to battle anew with the rigors of Nature again in the morning.

          The long, bitter winter in the ice-bound canyon would have long since faded from my mind, but it has become crystallized into a sort of dim legend on account of the impression made by the forty mince-pies. 

The Gatherer.

From "The Golden Era"; December, 1885.