Antique Lambrecht's Mince Meat Jar Label 🏷️ Lambrecht Creamery New York & New Jersey NOS 1910s–1930s

Who Made Lambrecht's Mince Meat? 🥧 Lambrecht's Mince Meat Jar Label, Lambrecht Creamery, New York - New Jersey

Size: 3" x 2 1/4" ~ Never used.

A sweet little label with a big recipe on it. It's printed in navy blue on cream card with rounded corners and a neat double-line border, and it reads: LAMBRECHT'S MINCE MEAT, "Combines apples, sugar, raisins, currants, candied peels, beef, spices, salt, cane syrup and brandy." Then the directions, "To the contents of this jar add one half cup of water," NET WGT. 1¾ LBS., and at the bottom, DISTRIBUTED BY LAMBRECHT CREAMERY, NEW YORK - NEW JERSEY. Beef and brandy in the same jar, the way mincemeat used to be made. The back is blank, with the printing showing through in reverse. It never made it onto a jar.

🥛 The Lambrecht Creamery

Lambrecht was a big dairy company, with plants in Chicago, Milwaukee and Racine. The Chicago creamery made the papers on November 29, 1928: two days after robbers held up 30 employees and took $7,000 from the company safe, they came back while a $10,000 payroll was in the office, and ran straight into Policeman John Murphy, who had been posted at the creamery just in case. In 1931 the Grain and Feed Journals, reporting from Milwaukee, said the Lambrecht Creamery Co. was building the world's largest poultry farm, "chicken apartment houses" of 6,000 birds apiece, 120,000 hens in all, good for 21,600,000 eggs a year. And in 1942 the Milwaukee ice cream drivers won a raise from the Lambrecht Creamery.

The New York - New Jersey end of the business is the one on this label. A 1939 guide to Long Island lists Lambrecht Creamery among the distributors in Mineola, and in 1946 the Lambrecht Creamery Co. of 168 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Newark, New Jersey, contracted for a $58,000 cold storage building in Hillside.

🎄 Mince Pie Lore

Mince pie goes back to medieval England, possibly to the crusaders coming home with spices, and it really was made with meat: beef, mutton, tongue, even tripe. The ingredients were expensive, so it was a feast-day pie, and it became the Christmas pie. English settlers brought it to New England, where it went on the table at Thanksgiving too.

The folklore is the best part. They say it's lucky to eat as many mince pies as you can before Christmas, and that every mince pie you eat during the twelve days of Christmas brings a happy month in the year ahead. Some say you should never cut one, or you'll cut your luck, and it's bad luck to turn one down when it's offered. And you've probably heard that the Puritans banned mince pies. Food historians call that a myth: the Puritans banned Christmas itself in 1647, along with Easter and Whitsun, and gave the poor mince pie a bad name, but there was never a law against the pie.

It's a perfect little piece for a vintage kitchen, a recipe box or a holiday display.