No, not that Will, sorry. We haven’t unearthed a long-lost Elizabethan recipe from Stratford-upon-Avon. We should say our very own Research Fellow and Lecturer, Dr Will Tosh, has been busy in the kitchen baking up a Christmas storm with his Granny’s mince pie recipe. Find out how to make your own sweet-meats, and learn the history behind one of our much-loved (and much-eaten) festive traditions. Here’s Will to do the honours…

I’ll be honest: thinking up Shakespeare-themed Christmas content is an annual headache, given that most of our festive traditions are nineteenth-century innovations or imports.

Thank heavens then for mince pies, bona fide revenants of a style of celebration cooking well-known to Shakespeare: a coffin of pastry (yes, really, that was the term) surrounding a potent sticky compound of all things sweet, scented, far-flung and expensive. True, Shakespeare’s mince pies probably contained as much real meat as fruit, but the principles were there.

For Shakespeare, dried fruit and spices were the valuable products of merchant-venturing in the eastern Mediterranean. England’s taste for sugar was soon to drive the development of a genocidal slave economy in the Americas, but during Shakespeare’s life it was more likely to come in small and costly shipments from Madeira or Morocco.

Food fit for early modern banqueting needed to have a distant provenance to distinguish it from everyday local fare. In The Winter’s Tale the young shepherd is sent to do the shopping for a sheep-shearing feast with a list that doesn’t sound very different to an Ocado order for the Christmas baking weekend: sugar, currants, raisins, dates, prunes saffron, mace, nutmeg and ginger. In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle Mr Merrythought – whose every disturbing utterance is a proclamation of insane good cheer – ascribes his Rudolfian ‘jolly red nose’ to ‘nutmegs and ginger, cinnamon and cloves’, key ingredients in early modern party foods and still the flavour profile of most things Christmassy.

I can’t pretend my recipe has a pedigree that stretches back to Shakespeare, but it’s got some historical lineage. It belonged to my grandmother, Rosamond Sillem, known as Rob, who died many years ago at an advanced age and who carried with her an air of the Edwardian world in which she was brought up (she was born in 1904).

I suppose I should now reveal in the life of my Granny some unexpected Shakespearean connection. There is none. Fond as she was of quoting the literature she loved as a girl, Shakespeare for her was a matter of admiration rather than adoration (her passions were Walter Scott and Rudyard Kipling, neither of whom have a social media operation as sophisticated as Shakespeare’s).

But none of this matters because Granny’s mince pies were the best I’ve ever tasted. Well into old age she remained an industrial baker, arriving on Christmas morning with four, even five dozen pies packed into tins, although she might not have been quite so productive if it wasn’t for incessant badgering from me and my brother. I now suspect Granny would rather not have spent hours bent over a rolling pin at the age of 91, but we were unthinkingly self-absorbed children.

Nonetheless I urge you to become a mince pie-making machine this Christmas, as I happily do for my family. The recipe below makes exquisite little orange-scented pies, the crisp pastry pleasingly savoury against the intensely sweet mincemeat. Granny made hers with homemade mincemeat and old-fashioned lard; I use Trex. The important thing is to incorporate, in addition to the butter, a fat with minimal water content, as that ensures maximum flakiness. Be prepared for the pie tops to rise proud of their cases, like discs of wannabe puff pastry. The pies are best eaten slightly warm, as you scatter flakes over the carpet and think about Elizabethan feast days past.