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Most remarkably, mince pie achieved and maintained its hegemony despite the fact that everyone—including those who loved it—agreed that it reliably caused indigestion, provoked nightmares, and commonly afflicted the overindulgent with disordered thinking, hallucinations, and sometimes death.In order to determine the truth, Doerksen prepares a couple of mince pies himself. As they say over at Upworthy, you'll never believe what happened next! Or maybe you will. Anyway, it's the most delightful slice of food history you'll read today. Enjoy it with a cup of coffee and, naturally, a piece of pie. (And for fun, you even could dust off your old high school geometry skills and calculate the circumference of the whole pie, using π!)
Consider the case of Albert Allen of Chicago, arrested in 1907 for shooting his wife in the head. "It was this way," Allen was quoted as saying by the Trenton Times, "I ate three pieces of mince pie at 11 o'clock and got to dreaming that I was shaking dice. The other fellow was cheating and I tried to shoot his fingers off. When I awoke, I was holding the pistol in my hand and my wife was shot."
So maybe it happened that way and maybe it didn't. The point is that newspapers from the time of the Early Republic through the 1930s abounded with comparable cautionary anecdotes—as well as a lot of jokes—about the dangers of mince pie.
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