“Food That Time Forgot: Suet”

Imagine an ingredient so important that it shows up in every 18th century English or American cookbook. It shows up in dozens and dozens of recipes and it's not always used in exactly the same way. It's used in different styles of cooking and in different kinds of dishes, whether they're savory or sweet. We're talking about suet and suet is, well, it's the unrendered version of tallow. So tallow's gotten to be much more popular in the last 10 years or so. For 18th century cooking, we searched out suet in those early days and we worked hard at getting them because it is that important of an ingredient. It is used in so many different ways that without it, you really just, you can't quite do the cooking you really need to do, at least in an 18th century sense. Suet is a special kind of fat that is a organ fat. Another term for it would be kidney fat because it grows right around the organs and specifically right around the kidneys. A cow has about, let's say, 15 pounds of suet. In the 18th century, they're using four main oils. They're using butter mostly as an ingredient, but sometimes they'll fry in it. They're using lard basically to fry in and sometimes as an ingredient. And then we have suet, which we're talking about today. And then occasionally there's references to sweet oil or to olive oil, basically the same thing. And they're using that generally just in something like a salad. And all the suet oils that we use today really don't exist in the 18th century. So almost all the cooking is really done with some type of animal fat. There are some restaurants that have started using tallow because it has gotten so popular for things like french fries and other styles of modern cooking. It's got a high flash point or high smoke point for cooking. It's got a higher melting point. And it's also got some flavor components that other styles of cooking fats just do not have. So it is a wonderful ingredient, not only for 18th century cooking, but for cooking today. Now, what I've got here is raw suet. Now, today we don't talk about suet so much. We talk about tallow and they are related. In that, tallow is rendered suet. It is sort of the most dense version of suet that we can get. Now, we render it today. We render it into tallow because once it's rendered, it is very shelf stable. So you can put it in a jar and it's good for basically years on the shelf if it's sealed up. It does not go bad because when we render it, we take out all the extra components, moisture and different kinds of connective tissue that are here in this suet. This is about half of what comes out of a typical cow. The piece here is about eight pounds. So you might get 15 or 16, maybe 20 pounds of suet out of a cow. Now, I went to several specialty butcher shops. They looked at me like I was from another planet. They didn't really have any suet in stock and didn't say that they would have any in stock. But I went to a different butcher shop that was local to us, Wood Farms Premium Meats, and I went to the counter, said I want suet, and he says, how much? They had plenty. And he was working on a cow at that time and they just went in and got me the freshest piece that I possibly could. And I really suggest that. If you're gonna be rendering your own tallow or using kind of raw suet like we're gonna be using today, then try to find the freshest suet available. And this was a regular grass fed, so it is really, really good stuff. I was excited to be able to get a nice big piece like this. I was looking in the Complete Housewife from 1734 and they had 25 or 26 recipes that mentioned suet. And most of the time it's used for about three or four different particular qualities. It's used most often in something like a boiled pudding. It's used for a couple of different reasons there. Number one, we want to have that oily moisture in our boiled pudding. So it's a rich and savory dish, not just sweet and certainly not dry. And it also leaves little pockets. It melts at a very high temperature so that most of this pudding can get kind of cooked up and then it melts and leaves holes in it. So it's almost like a leavening technique. It's also used with any time you're cooking a dry meat, something that doesn't have enough fat with it in the first place and you'd want it to be rich and juicy. So if you're cooking something like venison that doesn't have a lot of fat or hare or rabbit, other kinds of dry beef dishes that don't have fat in them, so specifically something like a mince pie that uses its tongue and tongue doesn't have any fat in it, then you will lard it, which is adding those extra oils. Sometimes they use lard itself or other times they're using suet. And that will give you that wonderful non-dry, rich and moist meat. You will find it often used in sausages. So sausages really have this meat component. They have all these spice components. Sometimes it'll have something like breadcrumbs. And then almost every sausage recipe has a great quantity of fat in it. And suet is basically the go-to fat for that. Sometimes it'll be 50-50 meat and suet in a sausage. So again, when you cook them, you get it so it has lots of oil, lots of rich moisture to it. And that's just using it as an ingredient. It's also used quite often to fry in. Because of its high smoke point, because of the flavor that it brings along with it, you'll find often recipes where it'll say something like, you can fry this in lard or in suet. And in certain circumstances, you want the highest temperature possible. So suet is really the go-to for that. Now we're using beef suet here today, but suet is in a lot of other animals and it's mentioned in those 18th century cookbooks or in other styles of 18th century cooking. We've got some pemmican here. And pemmican in the 18th century, of course, was made with bison suet and a big bison would have a lot of suet. That's how they could make so much pemmican for surviving on those trips. But it's also in 18th century cookbooks as mutton suet. You'll find some references to venison suet. So right there in the organs of a deer. There is also a pork product that's called leaf lard, which is the closest that you will find inside of a pig or a hog. That is similar, but not quite as high a melting point as regular beef suet is. Suet isn't also just a food product. It would be used in commercial situations or let's say industrial settings when you needed this kind of an oil, or it's used in different kinds of skin creams or ointments in the 18th century. So you'll find a lot of medicines referencing the use of suet. To test out our suet, we're gonna be doing the quintessential recipe for suet in the 18th century. This is from Charlotte Mason's A Lady's Assistant from the end part of the 18th century, and it's called a suet pudding. A pound of suet shred, a quart of milk, four eggs, two teaspoonfuls of grated ginger, a little salt, and flour enough to make it a thick batter. Boil it for two hours. It may be into dumplings, or maybe she means you can make it into dumplings. Boil them half an hour. I picked this one out because it was very, very plain. Didn't have raisins in it or anything else. So we can really see the texture and the flavor difference between it and using something like chunked up butter instead. That's probably the closest thing we can get to the suet. So we're gonna be making two puddings, one which has our suet in here, and another one where I've chopped up very cold butter and put it in as chunks. First thing here, we're gonna take our eggs, crack them in the bowl, and whisk them up. I am going to use just two eggs instead of four because we're making a half recipe. Once our eggs are whisked, we can add the milk to this. Again, half of this recipe will be about one cup of milk. We're gonna whisk that together along with a teaspoonful of our ginger and about a half a teaspoonful of salt. Once that is mixed together, we can pour in our shredded suet. You can see the chunk size here. It's fairly small pieces. We're gonna pour that in and mix it, and then we're gonna add a little bit of flour until we get to this batter-style consistency. It's probably about a cup of flour, but really, it depends on your flour. So just keep adding it until you get to a very thick pancake-style batter. For the butter version, it's exactly the same except I've chopped up the butter into approximately the same size pieces as our suet, maybe a little bit bigger because, of course, I'm trying to emulate this, so I want that butter to melt slower, so I'm gonna leave these chunks a little bigger. We have our cloth hot out of the pot. So it's steaming hot. I'm using a pair of tongs. Now, let's shake some flour over the top of that, and that will help the pudding not stick to the cloth. So always coat your cloth with some flour first. Once that's done, all I need to do is gather that up into basically a ball shape, making sure to pull all the edges out so it comes together nicely, and then tie that off, not too tightly, because this pudding will grow as it boils. Once that is tied off, we can put this into boiling water. You don't wanna put it into cold water that's going to boil, but make sure it's boiling water. The water should stay boiling the entire time, so if you're boiling your pudding and it starts to run out of water, add boiling water to the pot. You don't wanna cool it off and have to get hot again. I'm gonna boil both of these for two hours. So as an experiment, this did not turn out like I expected it so it's been quite a while since I used raw suet. Usually on any of these baked puddings, I've used the rendered towel, and this turned out different, so interesting. Here's the butter one, and you can kind of take a real close look here. I've used extra big chunks of butter, but we can see the problem with the texture, not necessarily the spots where the butter melted away, but you can see it's got a very dense texture everywhere else other than where the giant chunks of butter were. But on the suet one, instead of completely melting, this suet kind of stayed in a gelled state, so it didn't melt all the way like it has done on many puddings I've done on the past. So if you use a rendered suet, you'll probably find that the suet completely melts away and it'll leave little pockets. Instead, we have little pockets of cooked suet, basically. So this is going to be different, probably different than most boiled puddings done today, even when you think you're using the right suet. So I'm very intrigued about the taste of the two different ones. Here's the butter version, and it's nice and buttery. That's good, but very dense. This one has a much softer texture to it. Don't know exactly why, except the suet did, I mean, they cooked basically the same amount of time, and this one's still much softer. The texture is so different from one to the other. This one is so much more moist. Probably got a little touch of meat flavor to it. So instead of bringing in the butter flavor, it's kind of got a meaty flavor to it. Still very, very good. In fact, the texture is two or three times better. Basically, this is super dense. This is not. It's really kept nice and soft and very, very edible. Now, I'm eating these just raw, so we can really, you know, taste the flavor on these. Generally, they were served with a pudding sauce. So you would mix up butter and wine and sugar in one-third portions there, and then you would just pour it over it, like we would use maple syrup on pancakes. They would do the same thing with these puddings. This one, you know, is rather plain because of that, but it is a plain pudding, meant to have a wonderful sauce that goes with it. But the texture is so much better on this one. I can see exactly why, even when it doesn't work like I expected to, with it completely melting away, it's still got a better texture. And no, it isn't, I mean, you might think with these kind of like chunks of fat there that it would be distasteful, and it isn't in the least. I really recommend using tallow in cooking, especially if you're trying 18th century cooking. And a really, if you can do it, try fresh suet. Unrendered in some of these recipes, it will make a difference.