Can there be more festive foods than mincemeat and plum pudding? Neither of which, at least not now, are correctly named. For mincemeat is fruit, distilled spirits, spices, and, thankfully, vegetable shortening. However at one time it was not only beef or venison as the filling but there was beef suet too. And plum pudding is really now just a fruit cake, with raisins, sultanas, and currants, though some people keep it in the family as it were and add dried prunes, which are technically dehydrated plums, re-constituted.
Now keeping with our theme, the largest mince pie was twenty feet across. It was made in 1932, and still maintains its record status. The biggest plum pudding was a year earlier, made for the PDSA, but it was split into just over eleven thousand smaller puddings for the poor. Therefore the largest plum pudding record is currently held by one which was made in 1992 and weighed 3.28 tonnes
We know that Atmore & Sons was formed in 1842 and that in 1878 they constructed a factory at 110 to 114, and 118, Tasker St, in Philadelphia, which included space for stabling and wagon storage, plus seven dwellings presumably for managers or important workers. Inside the factory was space for all they needed, storage facilities for dried fruit, and packaging, a sorting rooms, and a dedicated space for apple peeling. Then there was a separate building for canning, complete with a boiler. They also had premises at 141 South Front Street, which is the address that appears the card with the printed back that we featured as our card of the day on December 19 2023. It is recorded that their first advertising cards were made in the 1870s, and that they used two other printers at least, these being Clay, Cosack & Co. of Buffalo and Thomas Hunter.
In fact we now know of a site which shows all the cards from the various series, including both of ours in line 5 - though strangely this card also appears in another line, credited to Thomas Hunter. You can see them all at tradecards.com/atmores
Our card is printed by E. Ketterlinus & Co., which is often recorded as being formed in Philadelphia in 1842 but only staying there until 1855. That is why sometimes these cards are listed as being printed in the 1850s. However we have done a spot of research and have found out that this is incorrect. The confusion is because there is a father and a son.
The father, Eugene Ketterlinus was born in 1824, started E. Ketterlinus & Co in 1842, and died in 1886. He, and his brother Paul, were based at a very visible place, at the corner of Fourth Street and Arch Street in Philadelphia. They started out as label makers, but soon expanded into all kinds of day to day printing, and ended up printing for Congress.
The son, John Louis Ketterlinus, was born in 1852, and died in 1932, and he operated as his initials or as the Ketterlinus Printing House (or later Ketterlinus Lithographic Manufacturing Company). As his father aged, and eventually died, he came aboard the company, as manager, and then continuing to operate from the same address. It was he who really expanded the business by going out and looking for work, not just waiting for it to knock on the door and ask for a quote. In this way he managed to get the job of printing the advertising materials for the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine - which we know better as the 1876 Centennial Exposition, and as the first major international exhibition to be held in the United States of America.
He also made sure that every mechanical advancement in the printing and publishing field was on their premises, which enabled them to take on any work, knowing that it could be done in-house, without the extra costs, or risk of misprinting, resulting in farming sections of the work out to others.
Most of all he expanded the size of the factory, north and west, buying up neighbouring properties. And in 1896 they had enough space to design and construct an eight storey building in concrete, which was opened in 1905.
J.L. Ketterlinus retired in the 1920s, and died in 1932.
It appears that mince meat was last produced in 1948, and then things started to wind down. The showcase eight storey building was demolished in the mid 1960s, and the firm closed down in the early 1970s.