Antique Brick's Mince Meat Label 🥧 UNPRINTED Large Version, Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ, Blank Panel 1910s

# Could You Taste a Century of Pride in Every Jar? 🦁 The Story Behind Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat and the Label That Carried It

There is a particular kind of quiet confidence that only comes from half a century of doing something exceptionally well. You see it in old craftsmen who have stopped needing to raise their voices. You see it in family businesses that have outlasted their competitors not through aggression but through consistency. And every now and then — if you know where to look — you see it pressed into the surface of a piece of printed paper, in the form of a rearing lion on a heraldic shield, arcing above the words Consistently Superior Since 1874. That is what you are looking at when you hold a Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat label in your hands. Not a product. Not a sticker. A declaration of identity from a family that had been feeding the Mid-Atlantic's holiday tables for decades before this label ever left the press — and who wanted every grocer, every housewife, every Thanksgiving-table keeper in New Jersey and beyond to understand, in a single glance, exactly who they were dealing with. ---

What This Label Is — The Object, the Company, the Era

This is an original, unused, New Old Stock (NOS) paper can label for Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat, produced by Edgar Brick & Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey, and dating to the 1910s through 1930s. It measures 9.5 by 5 inches — the full wraparound size for a standard mince meat tin of the period — and it has never been applied to a can.

It came out of old printer's or warehouse stock exactly as it left the lithography press, clean and complete, carrying every ounce of the graphic authority that American commercial label printing commanded at its absolute peak. The printing process behind labels like this one was not incidental to their power — it was their power.

American commercial lithographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had elevated the craft of can and jar label printing to something approaching fine art. Working in layered stone or zinc plate impressions, pressmen built up color field by color field — the deep red, the warm cream, the authoritative black, the gold accent work, the bright yellow ground beneath those block-lettered words MINCE MEAT — until the finished label had a visual weight and presence that modern digital printing simply approaches differently.

This was labor-intensive, skilled, expensive work, and companies like Edgar Brick & Sons invested in it precisely because the label was the brand at the point of sale. There were no television spots. There were no radio jingles yet. There was the label on the shelf, and it had to do everything. This one did everything.

The heraldic lion rears on its shield at the top of the composition. The Nonpareil name rides a wide black ribbon banner — Nonpareil meaning, in the French borrowed by English commercial tradition, without equal, unmatched, the finest of its kind. And below it all, the Brick family name anchors the whole affair with the quiet authority of people who had been at this since Ulysses Grant was still a recent memory. ---

🦁 Edgar Brick & Sons — A Family, a Brand, a Legacy Pressed in Color

The Brick family's presence in the food-processing and packing world of southern New Jersey stretches back to 1874, and by the time these labels were being printed in the 1910s and 1920s, Edgar Brick & Sons had accumulated something that money alone cannot buy: earned reputation. The phrase "Consistently Superior Since 1874" arcing across the top of this label is not marketing language in the modern sense.

It is a statement of institutional memory. It tells you that fathers had handed the craft to sons, that recipes and standards had been maintained across decades of agricultural variation, supplier changes, and economic upheaval, and that the Brick family considered their name on a product to be a binding commitment rather than a convenience.

Mince meat itself — the sweetly spiced, fruit-and-suet-rich filling that filled the holiday pies of the American nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — was a prestige product in its canned form. Housewives who put up their own mince meat from scratch were respected; housewives who served Brick's Nonpareil from the tin were understood to have chosen the best available commercial alternative.

The word Nonpareil was not chosen casually. It was the company's explicit argument that their product had no peer in the market — and in the Mid-Atlantic grocery trade, that argument was apparently persuasive enough to sustain decades of production.

Whether or not the exact formulation survives in any archive, the label endures as evidence of what the product meant to those who made it and those who bought it. ---

📍 Crosswicks, New Jersey — Small Town, Serious Provenance

Crosswicks, in Burlington County, New Jersey, is one of those American towns that rewards the historically curious. Settled by Europeans in the seventeenth century, the town has a Quaker meeting house dating to the early 1700s and sits in a part of Burlington County that was, during the colonial and Federal periods, genuinely significant in the agricultural and commercial life of the region.

By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when the Brick family was establishing their food-processing operation, the area's agricultural richness — Burlington County's proximity to the Delaware River valley, its productive farmland, its established network of local suppliers — made it a logical base for a family operation producing preserved foods for regional distribution.

Small-town New Jersey food processors of this era occupied an interesting commercial position. They were too small to compete nationally with the great Chicago or New York packers, but they had something those operations did not: local trust. The grocer in Bordentown knew Brick's. The housewife in Trenton or Burlington had grown up with Brick's on the shelf.

That regional loyalty was the company's competitive moat, and the label — with its confident heraldic imagery, its bold color field, its Crosswicks, NJ address printed clearly — made the local connection part of the product's identity rather than a limitation. Local legend in Crosswicks holds that during the holiday run-up — the October and November weeks when mince meat production was at its peak — the whole town could smell the operation.

Spice, suet, dried fruit, and the particular warm-sweet steam of a cooking room at full production apparently carried far enough on a still autumn morning to function as an unofficial announcement that the season had arrived. Whether this memory survives in any written account or lives only in the oral tradition of longtime Burlington County families, it belongs in the record — because it is exactly the kind of sensory fact that labels like this one are designed to summon back into existence.

The town's Quaker heritage is also worth noting in this context. The commercial culture of Burlington County Quaker-descended families tended toward plain dealing, careful quality, and reputation as currency. Whether or not the Brick family was itself Quaker, operating in that commercial tradition meant that your word on your product was your bond, and that putting Consistently Superior Since 1874 on a label carried an ethical as well as a marketing weight. ---

🖼️ The Graphic Language of This Label — American Commercial Art at Full Authority

It is worth slowing down to look at what this label actually does as a designed object, because the intelligence in its composition is not accidental. The heraldic lion on the shield is doing specific cultural work. In the vocabulary of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American commercial design, heraldic imagery — shields, lions, crests, banners — communicated established quality, old-world tradition, and continuity.

British food brands had used heraldic devices for generations before American manufacturers adopted the language, and by the 1910s it was well-understood shorthand for this company has been doing this for a long time and takes it seriously. For Edgar Brick & Sons, with their 1874 founding date, the claim was entirely legitimate.

The color palette — red, cream, black, gold, blue, with that bright yellow ground for the main product text — is characteristic of the best American chromolithographic and letterpress label work of the era. These colors were chosen for shelf visibility as much as for aesthetics: a label had to catch the eye from across a grocery aisle, had to read clearly in gas or incandescent light, and had to hold up to the handling a stock room put it through.

The fact that this New Old Stock example retains its full color presence after a century is testimony both to the quality of the original printing and to the preservation luck that brings it to collectors today. The wide ribbon banner carrying the Nonpareil name is a compositional decision with real elegance — it anchors the middle of the label, creates a visual rest between the heraldic upper zone and the bold-lettered product identification below, and frames the brand's key quality claim in a shape that the eye naturally reads as important.

These were not naive design decisions. The commercial artists and pressmen who composed labels like this one were working at the intersection of fine-art training and practical trade knowledge, and their work deserves to be recognized as the sophisticated visual communication it was. ---

🖼️ Display Ideas

There are as many ways to honor a label like this as there are collectors who love them. Here are some approaches that do the piece genuine justice:

- 🪟 Frame it behind UV-protective glass in a simple period-appropriate frame — black or gilt — and let it hang in a kitchen, dining room, or pantry where it reads as the bold graphic statement it was always intended to be.

• 🦁 Group it in a NJ food heritage display alongside other Crosswicks, Burlington County, or broader South Jersey commercial graphics — crate labels, trade cards, early advertising ephemera — as a focused regional collection that tells a place's story.
• 🎄 Make it a seasonal installation — this label belongs in November and December, displayed with vintage holiday kitchenware, antique pie tins, or early twentieth century cookbook ephemera as part of a Thanksgiving or Christmas vignette.
• 📚 Incorporate it into a food history library as a primary-source object displayed alongside books on American culinary history, the home economics movement, or the evolution of canned and preserved foods in the domestic kitchen.
• 🏛️ Donate or loan it to a local historical society — Burlington County, Crosswicks, or broadly New Jersey food and agricultural history collections would find this piece meaningful, and reproductions or display facsimiles could extend its interpretive life.
• 🖼️ Float-mount it without adhesive in an archival mat so both the printed face and the aged paper reverse are preserved and the piece can be safely removed if needed — a display approach that respects the object's integrity as a historical document. ---

🎁 Who Collects These

The people who search for and treasure pieces like this Brick's Nonpareil label are a varied and deeply knowledgeable community, and this label speaks to several distinct collecting identities at once. New Jersey and Burlington County local history collectors will recognize the Crosswicks, NJ provenance immediately and understand what the Brick family name meant in the regional food trade.

For collectors building a picture of their home county's commercial and agricultural past, a NOS label from a local operation of this standing is a primary document — not a decoration but a record. American advertising ephemera and can label collectors will appreciate the graphic quality, the NOS condition, the era, and the heraldic visual language.

This is a strong example of the genre from a legitimately well-established regional brand, and strong examples in NOS condition are always worth attending to. Food history and culinary heritage enthusiasts — including those whose interest runs through academic food studies, culinary history writing, or the growing world of historic recipe recreation — will recognize this as a window into the holiday food culture of the early twentieth century American household, when mince meat was a serious seasonal staple and the best commercial version in your region was a considered purchase. Antique kitchen and pantry décor collectors will see exactly what this label does on a wall: bold, warm, historically resonant, graphically authoritative.

It looks like it belongs somewhere that takes food and tradition seriously. Graphic design and print history collectors who study the evolution of American commercial lithography and letterpress work will find in this label a well-preserved example of the era's best practices — color field construction, heraldic composition, ribbon banner lettering, and the bold product-identification typography that characterized the strongest label work of the period. ---

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What does "New Old Stock" mean for a label like this, and why does it matter?

New Old Stock — NOS — means that this label was never used. It was printed, stored, and has come down to us without ever having been applied to a can. When you hold a NOS label from the 1910s or 1930s, you are holding it in essentially the same condition as the pressman who pulled it from the press.

That directness with the original object — that unbroken chain from production to your hands — is what gives NOS ephemera its particular emotional and collector weight.

How do I know this label dates to the 1910s–1930s?

Dating commercial can labels of this period involves reading several overlapping signals. The printing technology — the color palette choices, the weight of the letterpress impression, the specific lithographic techniques used — speaks to a particular production era.

The graphic design vocabulary: heraldic composition, ribbon banners, the specific style of the bold display lettering, and the way the color fields are constructed all point to the pre-World War II period of American commercial label printing. The company's known operational history and the specific address details on the label provide documentary anchoring.

Taken together, these factors point clearly to the 1910s–1930s window, with the visual language sitting most comfortably in the teens through the twenties of the twentieth century.

Is the lion on the label a specific heraldic reference, or a general design choice?

The rearing — or rampant, in heraldic language — lion on a shield is one of the oldest and most widely recognized symbols in Western heraldic tradition, associated across centuries with strength, continuity, and sovereign authority.

By the time Edgar Brick & Sons adopted it for their label, the rampant lion had been a staple of American commercial heraldic design for decades, used by food, beverage, and dry goods companies who wanted to communicate Old World-style quality and established standing. For the Brick family — operating since 1874, using the word Nonpareil, claiming consistent superiority across half a century — the choice of a rampant lion on a shield was compositionally and rhetorically coherent.

It was the visual argument for exactly what the text was saying. Whether the specific shield design had any private heraldic significance to the Brick family, or whether it was a commercial artist's strong generic solution, is a question the surviving label cannot fully answer — and that ambiguity is part of what makes it historically interesting.

What is mince meat, and why was it such a significant product for a company like this?

Mince meat — sometimes written as one word, mincemeat — is a preserve of dried fruits, suet or fat, spices, and often spirits that was the traditional filling for English and American holiday pies from medieval times forward. By the nineteenth century it had become deeply embedded in American Thanksgiving and Christmas food culture, and the commercial canned version represented a significant domestic convenience: rather than spending the considerable time and effort required to make mince meat from scratch, a housewife could buy a quality canned product and trust it to anchor her holiday pie.

For a company like Edgar Brick & Sons, the mince meat line was a prestige seasonal product — the kind of item where Nonpareil was a credible claim because the product was tasted and remembered and compared year over year by the same households. Getting a family to trust your mince meat was getting them to trust you with their Thanksgiving table, and that was not a casual thing.

How should I store this label to preserve it?

For long-term preservation of a paper label of this age and quality, archival best practices favor a few simple principles. Store it flat, not rolled or folded. Keep it in an acid-free sleeve or folder — available from archival supply companies — to protect it from contact with other papers, which may carry acids that migrate.

Store it away from direct light, especially direct sunlight, which degrades paper and fades pigments over time. Moderate, stable humidity is kinder to old paper than either very dry or very damp conditions. If you choose to frame it for display, UV-protective glazing — either glass or acrylic — significantly slows light-related fading.

These are not complicated precautions, and they will extend the life of the label by generations.

Could this label have come from a larger print run, and are other examples likely to appear?

Possibly, and occasionally. Commercial label print runs in this era were typically substantial — printers didn't economically produce small quantities — so there may be other surviving examples of this specific label in collections, archives, or as-yet-undiscovered old stock somewhere in New Jersey or the broader Mid-Atlantic region.

However, the survival rate of paper ephemera from the 1910s–1930s is never predictable. Paper labels were considered consumable objects — tools of trade, not documents to be preserved — and the vast majority were used, discarded, or lost to dampness, pests, fire, and the general entropy of commercial storage over a century.

NOS examples that have survived in the condition this one presents are not common, and finding them requires either fortunate discovery or the kind of patient, deep searching that serious ephemera collectors know well.

Does the Brick family or the Crosswicks operation have any surviving presence in the historical record?

The Brick family's 1874 founding date, their use of the Edgar Brick & Sons corporate name, and their Crosswicks, NJ address are documented through the commercial record embedded in the label itself and in the broader context of Burlington County's agricultural and food-processing history. Burlington County has a well-developed local history research community, and the Burlington County Historical Society maintains records that bear on exactly this kind of regional commercial history.

Researchers interested in tracing the Brick family's full operational arc — from 1874 forward through the production period represented by this label — would find the county historical society, old New Jersey business directories, and regional newspaper archives (particularly coverage of the food-packing industry) to be productive starting points.

The label itself, as a primary source, is exactly the kind of artifact that local history collections value precisely because it anchors the family's commercial identity in physical, datable form.