Vintage 1970s Premier Mince Meat Can Label 🏷️ Francis H. Leggett Company Cincinnati Ohio NOS

Who Was Francis H. Leggett? 🏷️ Vintage 1970s Premier Mince Meat Can Label, Francis H. Leggett Company, Cincinnati, Ohio

Size: 3" x 2 1/4"

Premier in big white script on navy with a red swoosh and a little ®, then MINCE MEAT, then the recipe: "Apples, Sugar, Raisins, Currants, Peels, Beef, Cane Syrup, Spices, Salt and Brandy. Add 1/4 cup of water to contents." NET WEIGHT 1 LB. 1 OZ. AVOIR. and METRIC EQUIV. 482 GRAMS, and at the bottom FRANCIS H. LEGGETT COMPANY, INC., DISTRIBUTORS, CINCINNATI, OHIO, U.S.A. Never used.

🏙️ A New York Grocery Giant

Francis H. Leggett went to work in his father's grocery business, R. L. Leggett & Co., in 1858 when he was 18, and was a partner six years later. In 1870 he started his own wholesale grocery, Francis H. Leggett & Co., and within eleven years it was one of the biggest in New York, with a branch office in Bordeaux, France. In 1881 the company bought the corner of Franklin and Varick Streets and West Broadway, and a nine-story grocery building went up there in 1882. In 1913 the city began taking property to extend Seventh Avenue and to widen and extend Varick Street, and more than half of the Leggett building stood in the way. They had the architect C. P. H. Gilbert put a new wall on what was left, and in March 1914 the firm announced it was moving, though it held on to the property. The New-York Tribune said "no mercantile house is more widely known, or more highly esteemed." Premier was the Leggett brand - they even put out booklets about their Premier Shrimp, one of them carrying a testimonial from Robert E. Peary, the Arctic explorer.

📍 How It Got to Cincinnati

Around 1960 Leggett was losing money, with distribution in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, and Seeman Brothers - the White Rose company - picked it up for very little. In 1965 Seeman sold off its wholesale business, the White Rose and Premier labels with it, to the Di Giorgio Corporation. That's the Leggett on this label: a Cincinnati distributor still selling under the old Premier name. The word DISTRIBUTORS is printed right there, so the Cincinnati company sold this mince meat rather than packed it - and a Leggett label with a New York address put it the same way: the Mississippi state archives keeps a Premier shrimp label naming Leggett & Co. as the distributors, New York, U.S.A.

📅 Dating It

Two things on the label tell you it's not as old as it looks. The ® after Premier is the registered-trademark symbol that came in with the 1946 Lanham Act, and the METRIC EQUIV. 482 GRAMS under the net weight is the kind of dual measure American packers added in the 1970s, when the country was getting ready to go metric - the Metric Conversion Act passed in 1975. So this is a 1970s label wearing a very old name.

🎄 An Old Christmas Pie

Mince pie is a lot older than any can. Heavily spiced pies of minced meat, suet and dried fruit were a Christmas favorite in Elizabethan England, and the English settlers carried the taste for them to New England. The Pilgrims and Puritans didn't keep Christmas, so over here mince pie went to Thanksgiving instead. Amelia Simmons' American Cookery, printed in 1796, starts her minced pie with four pounds of boiled beef and six pounds of raw apple - and there are the apples and the beef, still on this label nearly two centuries later. Through the 1800s more and more cooks left the meat out, so the Beef in this recipe is a real old-fashioned holdover. And there's the old superstition: eat a mince pie on each of the twelve days of Christmas and you get a happy month for each one in the year ahead.

🥧 A Bit of Lore

Collectors like to say mince meat was one of Prohibition's quiet loopholes - a jar of pie filling was one of the few places brandy could still turn up on a grocery shelf. By the time this label was printed, of course, nobody had to hide it.

A good one for a vintage kitchen, a recipe box or a holiday baking display. You'll get one like the one shown.