Antique Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat Label 🦁 Edgar Brick & Sons Crosswicks NJ — NOS 1910s–1930s

When a Rampant Lion Stood Guard Over Your Holiday Table — Do You Know What This Label Is Really Saying? 🦁

There is a particular feeling that comes over you when you hold a piece of printed ephemera that was made with absolute conviction. Not the tentative conviction of a company feeling its way through a new market, but the settled, unhurried authority of a business that had already been doing this for forty or fifty years and knew exactly who it was. That is the feeling this label gives you. Before you read a single word, before you parse the typography or trace the ribbon banner or count the colors in that heraldic shield, you feel it — the weight of a family's reputation pressed into ink and paper, offered to you across the better part of a century. This is what New Old Stock means at its very best: not simply an unused object, but an unused argument. Edgar Brick and Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey were arguing, in every jar and on every label, that they made the finest mince meat on the Mid-Atlantic table. And if the lion rearing on that shield has anything to say about it, they were right.

🥧 What You Are Looking At — The Object Itself

This is an original antique label for Brick's Nonpareil Mince Meat, produced by Edgar Brick & Sons of Crosswicks, New Jersey, dating to the 1910s through 1930s. It measures 3.5 x 3 inches and it is New Old Stock (NOS), meaning it was never applied to a jar, never dampened by steam or stained by a warehouse shelf.

It left the printer's shop in exactly the condition it arrived in the world, and it has remained that way ever since. The label was produced through the American commercial lithography and letterpress tradition at the fullest expression of that craft — an era when printers competed not merely on accuracy but on beauty, when a food label was understood to be a small act of persuasion and a larger act of civic pride.

The color palette runs to red, cream, black, gold, and blue, organized around a heraldic shield topped by a rearing lion — the house mark of Edgar Brick and Sons across their entire product line. The word NONPAREIL rides a wide black ribbon banner with the confident sprawl of a brand that knows it doesn't need to shout.

Below it, in large red type set against a field of bright yellow, the words MINCE MEAT do exactly what great commercial lettering was born to do: they stop your eye and hold it. Arcing across the top in quiet, composed letterpress type — the typographic equivalent of a firm handshake — the phrase "Consistently Superior Since 1874" completes the argument.

That is not marketing language. By the time this label was printed, it was history.

🏭 The Company — Edgar Brick & Sons and the Business of Nonpareil

The Brick family's roots in New Jersey food production run deep enough that tracing them feels less like research and more like following a creek back to its source. Edgar Brick and Sons was established in 1874 — a date that places the company squarely in the post-Civil War era of American agricultural commerce, when New Jersey farms were feeding not just local tables but the growing industrial cities of the northeastern seaboard.

Philadelphia was a day's wagon ride away. Trenton was closer still. The Delaware River corridor was one of the most productive food-supply chains on the continent, and a family operation that could establish itself there in the 1870s and hold its position through the Gilded Age, through the turn of the century, and into the Depression era had done something genuinely difficult.

It had outlasted fashions, panics, tariffs, and the arrival of industrial food competitors with far greater capitalization. The word Nonpareil — French for "without equal," borrowed into English food and confectionery trade in the nineteenth century as the highest possible grade designation — was not chosen carelessly.

It was a specific claim, a legal-grade assertion in the parlance of the trade, and putting it on your label in the 1910s when the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 had sharpened the scrutiny on food labeling meant you stood behind it.

Mince meat in this era was a serious product category. This was not the jarred shortcut it would eventually become in the postwar supermarket age. Traditional mince meat — the kind a company like Edgar Brick and Sons would have staked a heraldic lion on — was a labor-intensive, heavily spiced preparation of meat, suet, fruit, cider, and spirits, cooked down and preserved in a way that made it shelf-stable through the autumn and winter months. It was a Thanksgiving staple, a Christmas essential, and a marker of household quality. The jar on your holiday shelf told your guests something about you. Choosing Nonpareil was a statement. The lion on the label was there to remind you that you had chosen correctly.

🗺️ The Town — Crosswicks, New Jersey and What It Meant to Be Made There

Crosswicks is one of those New Jersey place names that carries its history lightly and all the more powerfully for it. Settled in the seventeenth century by Quakers, it sits in Burlington County on the banks of Crosswicks Creek — a tidal stream that once served as a legitimate commercial waterway connecting the village to the Delaware River and, through it, to Philadelphia and the wider Atlantic trade. By the time Edgar Brick and Sons was in full operation, Crosswicks was a small but deeply rooted agricultural community, the kind of place where a family business could hold a reputation across generations because everyone in three counties knew the name and knew what it stood for. The village retains much of its eighteenth and nineteenth century character today, which is part of why collectors and local historians have taken a particular interest in artifacts of its commercial past. A Brick's label is, among other things, a Crosswicks document — a piece of the town's economic and visual history.

The surrounding Burlington County agricultural belt was ideally positioned for the mince meat trade. Apple orchards, small grain farms, and proximity to both the Philadelphia and Trenton markets gave Crosswicks-area producers a natural advantage. Rail connections through Bordentown and Burlington brought finished goods to market efficiently, and the Delaware River trade that had sustained the region since colonial times was still a living commercial artery through the early decades of the twentieth century. When you look at that label, you are looking at the product of a very specific landscape — a New Jersey of orchards and tidal creeks and family names that ran through three generations of the same business without flinching.

Local legend has it that the Brick family operation was one of the last of the true farmhouse-style commercial mince meat producers in the Burlington County corridor, and that neighboring farms would contract their apple and cider production specifically to Edgar Brick and Sons each autumn, making the entire Crosswicks Creek watershed informally part of the supply chain. Whether or not every detail of that account holds up to archival scrutiny, it is the kind of story that persists in agricultural communities because it feels true to the way those economies actually worked. Lore passed down among ephemera collectors holds that NOS Brick's labels surface periodically from estate sales in the Burlington County and Mercer County areas — pulled from old general store back rooms, from farm outbuilding shelves, from the kind of organized-chaos storage that kept a hundred years of commercial material perfectly preserved simply because no one ever got around to throwing it away. That is the origin story of New Old Stock, and it is never more vivid than when you are holding something like this.

🖨️ The Label as Artifact — American Commercial Lithography at Its Height

It would be a mistake to think of this label only in terms of what it advertised. Look at it as a printed object and you are looking at the American commercial printing industry operating in full confidence. The period from roughly 1880 through the 1930s represents the great age of American food and product labeling — a period when lithography houses in cities like Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Chicago were producing work of genuine artistic sophistication for clients who understood that the label was the brand, because for most consumers the label was the only brand touchpoint that existed. There was no television, no radio saturation, no digital presence. There was the label on the jar, and it had to do everything.

The heraldic vocabulary Edgar Brick and Sons deployed — the rampant lion, the shield, the ribbon banner — was a deliberate choice from a visual grammar that American commercial printers had inherited from European trade traditions and thoroughly naturalized. A rampant lion in the early twentieth century signaled the same things it had signaled on coats of arms for five hundred years: strength, lineage, warranted quality. On a food label, it said this family stands behind this product with their name and their history. The printer who set the type for "Consistently Superior Since 1874" was working with that same vocabulary, in letterpress, with the careful hand-alignment that the era required. Each color pass on a lithographed label of this complexity required a separate printing run, precise registration, and skill that took years to develop. A five-color label — red, cream, black, gold, blue — was a real investment, and a company that authorized it was making a public statement about how seriously it took its own presentation.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🖼️ Frame it solo in a simple black or gilt frame — the label's scale at 3.5 x 3 inches suits a small frame with a generous mat, and the color palette holds the wall without competing with surrounding décor.
• 🍂 Build a seasonal kitchen gallery wall around it — pair with other antique food labels, vintage seed packets, or early twentieth century recipe cards for a curated harvest-season display that works beautifully from September through the winter holidays.
• 🦁 Feature it as the centerpiece of a New Jersey or Mid-Atlantic regional history collection — alongside Burlington County maps, Trenton-area trade cards, or Delaware Valley agricultural ephemera for a wall that tells a coherent regional story.
• 🏡 Use it in a farmhouse or cottage kitchen as a period-appropriate accent — the red, cream, and gold palette pairs naturally with vintage ironstone, enamelware, and early American pottery without ever feeling forced or costume-y.
• 🎨 Incorporate it into a collector's étagère or shadow box with related mince meat or holiday baking ephemera — vintage pie tins, antique recipe booklets, or Victorian-era holiday trade cards to create a three-dimensional tableau.
• 📚 Display it flat in an archival-quality sleeve in a portfolio or flat file as part of a serious ephemera collection — NOS condition labels are increasingly sought by institutions and serious private collectors for exactly this kind of preservation-minded keeping.

🎁 Who Collects These — and Why They Care

Antique food labels occupy a remarkable position in the collecting world because they sit at the intersection of so many different passions. Ephemera collectors prize them for their print quality, their survival in NOS condition, and the documentary record they preserve of businesses and places that no longer exist in any other form. Kitchen and country antiques collectors love the visual warmth they bring to a period-appropriate room, and the way a well-chosen label can anchor a display with more authority than a reproduction print ever could. New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic regional historians — both professional and passionate amateur — actively seek out Crosswicks, Burlington County, and Delaware Valley commercial material because it is genuinely scarce and genuinely meaningful as local history. A Brick's Nonpareil label is a Burlington County primary source in the most accessible form imaginable.

Holiday and Americana collectors are drawn to the mince meat category specifically because of its deep association with Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions — the label's seasonal resonance makes it a natural for collectors who build displays around the American holiday table. Graphic design and commercial art enthusiasts collect labels of this era for the same reasons they collect vintage circus posters or WPA travel prints: the work is simply excellent, made by skilled hands at the peak of a craft tradition, and it rewards close looking. And then there are the collectors who are drawn specifically to the heraldic lion — yes, that is a real subcategory, and a rampant lion on a commercial label of this age and quality is exactly the kind of find they organize their hunts around. Whoever you are when you come to this label, it has something to say to you.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Is this label genuinely New Old Stock, and what does that mean for its condition?

Yes — this is authentic New Old Stock, meaning it was produced in the 1910s–1930s and never used. It was pulled from old commercial stock exactly as it left the printer, unaffected by the moisture, steam, adhesive, or handling that an applied label inevitably accumulates. NOS condition is the holy grail for paper ephemera collectors because it preserves the full graphic presence of the original print — color saturation, fine detail, and the particular surface quality of early twentieth century lithography that simply cannot survive the labeling process intact. What you are receiving is the label as the printer intended it to be seen.

What exactly does "Nonpareil" mean, and why does it matter on this label?

"Nonpareil" is a French-derived English term meaning "without equal" or "peerless," and in the American food trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was used as the highest grade designation a producer could claim — above "extra," above "fancy," above "superior." Placing it on a label was a statement of quality that, particularly after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 brought greater scrutiny to food advertising claims, carried real commercial weight. Edgar Brick and Sons had been using the Nonpareil designation since at least their founding-era branding, which means by the time these labels were printed they had been defending that claim for decades. It is not a casual word choice. It is the entire brand proposition compressed into a single word on a ribbon banner.

How old is the company, and what do we know about Edgar Brick and Sons?

Edgar Brick and Sons was established in 1874 in Crosswicks, New Jersey — Burlington County, in the Delaware River corridor of Central Jersey. By the time the labels in this NOS run were produced, the company had been in continuous operation for between forty and sixty years, an extraordinary span for a family food business of that era. The "and Sons" construction in the company name reflects the era's convention of marking a family succession — the business passed through at least one generational transition while maintaining the Edgar Brick name and brand identity, which speaks to the strength of the family's regional reputation. The heraldic lion and shield were consistent across their product line, functioning as a true house mark that consumers in the Mid-Atlantic market would have recognized across multiple product categories.

What was mince meat in this era, and how is it different from what we know today?

Mince meat in the 1910s–1930s was a substantially different — and substantially more serious — product than its later incarnations. Traditional mince meat was a preservation preparation combining finely chopped meat (typically beef or venison), beef suet, cooked-down dried fruits (currants, raisins, apples), spices, cider, and spirits, all slow-cooked and sealed in a way that produced a shelf-stable product capable of lasting through the winter months. It was a genuine craft product, regional in character, with each producer's recipe functioning as a closely held trade secret. The suet and spirit content varied by region and producer, and the best mince meat was distinguished by its depth of spice, the quality of its fruit, and the precision of its preservation. A company that could call its product "Nonpareil" and back it up for fifty-plus years in the competitive Mid-Atlantic market had a recipe — and a process — worth taking seriously.

What is the significance of the heraldic lion on this label?

The rampant lion — shown rearing on its hind legs on the heraldic shield — is the visual anchor of the entire Brick's brand identity, and its presence on this label is anything but accidental. In European heraldic tradition, a rampant lion signifies strength, valor, and the standing of a noble house. In American commercial printing, the heraldic vocabulary was actively borrowed and adapted by food and beverage producers who wanted to communicate lineage, quality, and warranted reliability — the commercial equivalent of an old family crest. Edgar Brick and Sons used the lion across their product line as a true house mark, meaning that any Mid-Atlantic consumer who knew the Brick's lion knew immediately they were looking at a Brick's product, even before reading the text. It is brand identity design operating at a level of sophistication that we tend to associate with much later marketing practice, but which the best American food producers understood intuitively a hundred and fifty years ago.

Is Crosswicks, New Jersey still a recognizable place, and does local interest affect collectibility?

Crosswicks is very much a living place — a small historic village in Chesterfield Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, that retains much of its eighteenth and nineteenth century architectural fabric and is recognized on the New Jersey and National historic registers. Because the village has preserved its historic character, there is an active local and regional interest in artifacts of its commercial and agricultural past, and Brick's labels are among the most visually compelling pieces of that material history. Burlington County collectors, South Jersey antique enthusiasts, and Delaware Valley regional historians all represent natural collector audiences for this piece, and that geographic specificity adds a layer of desirability that purely generic commercial ephemera simply cannot match. When a place is still real and still cherished, the things that came from it carry that living weight.

How should I store or display this label to preserve it?

For long-term preservation, the gold standard for NOS paper ephemera is archival-quality polyester or polypropylene sleeve storage — acid-free, lignin-free materials that will not interact chemically with the paper over time. Kept away from direct light, humidity fluctuation, and temperature extremes, a label in NOS condition like this one can remain stable for generations. For display, UV-filtering glazing in a frame dramatically reduces the fading risk from ambient and natural light, and a conservation-grade mat board will prevent the label from direct contact with the glass. Many collectors choose to keep their finest NOS pieces in archival sleeves for preservation and rotate display reproductions or lesser-condition examples — but this piece, with its full color saturation and graphic authority, is the kind of thing that rewards being seen, and a well-considered framing with proper UV protection is entirely appropriate for a piece of this quality and character.