Antique Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat Labels 🏡 Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ 1910s-1930s Litho Set NOS

Size: 9.5 x 5 inches ~ New old stock, never applied. They vary a little one to the next. That is the large label; the oval jar label and the ingredient card are smaller.

🏡 The Mincemeat With Beef and Brandy in It, From the Village That Made More Than Anyone in America

Read the ingredients on these labels and you are reading a recipe most of the country stopped making: apples, raisins, currants, beef, cane syrup, spices — and brandy. This is a set of three original, unused Brick's Old Homestead Mince Meat labels printed for Edgar Brick & Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey, a family firm in a Burlington County village that by World War II was out-producing every other mincemeat maker in the United States. The company stopped making mincemeat in 1968 and closed in 1979, and its factory now stands vacant on Preservation New Jersey's endangered list. These are 1910s–1930s New Old Stock, from the same stock photographed.

🧾 What Is In the Set

1. The large label. A cream sheet inside a stepped navy border, with Brick's and Old Homestead in big navy script over a color farm scene: a red-roofed farmhouse, a barn, a windmill, trees and cows along a fence. Yellow ornaments sit either side. Beneath, in pale blue capitals, MINCE MEAT, then the small motto CONSISTENTLY SUPERIOR SINCE 1874, then the full recipe: "OLD HOMESTEAD MINCE MEAT IS PREPARED FROM APPLES, SUGAR, RAISINS, CURRANTS, BEEF, CANDIED PEELS, CANE SYRUP, SALT, SPICES, BRANDY. PREPARED WITH 1-10 OF 1% BENZOATE OF SODA." The maker's line runs in red at the foot: PREPARED BY EDGAR BRICK & SONS, CROSSWICKS, N. J.

2. The oval jar label. Die-cut to a rounded shape for a jar, with BRICK'S in black and yellow, Old Homestead in red script, and its own version of the farm scene inside a yellow scroll frame. The lower half is solid blue with MINCE MEAT in yellow. This one spells the peel out as "candied orange and lemon peel," tells the cook to ADD 1/4 CUP WATER TO CONTENTS OF JAR, gives a net weight of 1 lb. 1 oz., and curves the maker's line around the bottom edge: EDGAR BRICK & SONS - MANUFACTURER - CROSSWICKS, N. J.

3. The ingredient card. No picture at all — black type in a ruled box on cream stock: "OLD HOMESTEAD MINCE MEAT is composed of Apples, Sugar, Raisins, Currants, Candied Peels, Beef, Cane Syrup, Spices, Salt and Brandy," with the firm's name set at the left and Crosswicks, N.J. at the right.

The backs are plain, with the front printing faintly showing through — never glued to a jar or tin.

🔎 Small Differences Worth Noticing

• Only the large label carries the 1874 motto and the benzoate of soda statement.
• Only the oval label gives a net weight and cooking directions.
• The oval label names "orange and lemon" peel; the other two just say "candied peels."
• Three color schemes for one product: navy, cream and red; blue, yellow and red; plain black on cream.

"Since 1874" is the founding, not the printing. It is the year Edgar Brick started making mincemeat, used as a badge. The benzoate of soda line matters too: benzoate of soda was one of the preservatives American courts had to settle after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and here the maker prints exactly how much went in.

👨‍🌾 Edgar Brick and His Sons

Edgar Brick sold mincemeat in his Crosswicks store before he ever made it, and he did not like the Philadelphia-made product he was stocking. In 1874 he began making his own. He sold 76 pounds of it that first year.

Sales kept climbing, and in 1879 he built a factory in a way only a small town would: he had two local farmhouses moved onto the property and joined together. By the early 1900s Edgar Brick & Sons was the largest mincemeat manufacturer in New Jersey.

Edgar Brick died in 1920 and his three sons, Arthur, Josiah and Charles, took over; Brick family members ran the business for the next 48 years. The peak came during World War II, when the factory employed 40 workers and produced three million pounds of mincemeat a year — the largest mincemeat maker in the United States.

Then Americans stopped buying it. As demand fell off, the company switched to making alcoholic beverages in 1968 and stopped making mincemeat altogether; it closed in 1979, and much of its equipment was auctioned. Preservation New Jersey placed the old factory on its endangered list in 2017. It stands vacant, and sections of its roof have collapsed.

The family's mark on the township outlasted the pies. Brick family members were instrumental in bringing electricity to Crosswicks, set up a mill and an ice plant on Crosswicks Creek, and formed the Chesterfield Township Historical Society.

🍷 Brandy, Prohibition and the Pie Loophole

That word "Brandy" on all three labels is the reason mincemeat has a Prohibition story. Almost as soon as national Prohibition took effect in 1920, people began lobbying to exempt popular culinary items, and in 1922 a court ruled that culinary products — mincemeat included — could contain liquor. Canned mincemeat afterward was reported to reach as much as 14 percent alcohol.

The Brick firm's own Banquet Hall label of the 1920s printed a Federal Prohibition Permit number and the statement "PROOF ALCOHOL BY VOLUME 14 PER CENT." A plain ingredient line reading "Spices, Salt and Brandy" was, for a stretch of American history, a legal loophole in print.

🥧 Why Mincemeat Had Beef in It

Mincemeat began in England between the 15th and 17th centuries as a fermented mixture of meat and fruit for pie filling — a way of keeping meat before modern preservation. Early recipes used beef or mutton with dried fruit, spices, and wine or vinegar; by the 18th century distilled spirits, brandy above all, had taken over as the preservative. By the middle of the twentieth century most mincemeat recipes had dropped the meat. These labels still list beef.

A legend worth retelling: the story goes that Oliver Cromwell banned mince pies at Christmas. It is a myth — Puritan governments did try to make Christmas more austere and looked down on indulgences like mince pies, but no such ban on eating them was ever passed.

🏘️ Crosswicks, New Jersey

Crosswicks sits along Crosswicks Creek in the northern part of Chesterfield Township, Burlington County. Its name comes from the Lenape word Crossweeksung, "house of separation." Chesterfield Friends Meeting, now Crosswicks Friends Meeting, was founded in 1684, and its brick meetinghouse went up in 1773 at a cost of £3,750.

That meetinghouse housed troops from both sides during the Revolution, on the understanding that the soldiers kept it free for Quaker worship on Sundays; about 2,100 American troops under General Cadwalader stayed there in December 1776. On June 23, 1778, five days before the Battle of Monmouth, American forces under Philemon Dickinson and William Maxwell fought a skirmish at Crosswicks to slow Sir Henry Clinton's British army. Three cannonballs hit the meetinghouse. One struck the brick wall and left an imprint, and that cannonball was saved and later mortared into the wall at the very spot — where it still sits.

A century after the cannonballs, the same small village became the mincemeat capital of the country.