Why do we eat mince pies?

Whether you call them Christmas pies, or mince pies, the tasty combination of fruit and pastry seems to please the masses.

Their initial design was meant to look like Jesus's crib, but over the year they have changed to generic Christmas patterns.

They contained meat initially, usually mutton as the crusaders came back from the middle east laden with spices.

In the 18th century they gradually changed into the fruit pie that we know today as sugar was coming in the masses from the slave plantations in the West Indies.