Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter is, it just doesn’t cut it for a Christmas pudding.
Suet is the hard creamy fat around the beef kidney. The best bits come in solid lumps; if you get suet that’s too intermingled with membrane it’s harder to grate. When it’s fresh it has a delicious smell (as far as I’m concerned) and a slightly pinkish colour. It should be grated, I say, rather than chopped, for lightness. A Christmas pudding made with suet and old beer is a thing of beauty and it will keep for months.
A Christmas pudding made with suet and old beer is a thing of beauty and it will keep for months
So, what’s the problem getting fresh suet? Most big abattoirs nowadays take the kidney suet out of the animal – presumably to sell to the packet suet company – and if your butcher doesn’t specifically request it, he won’t get it. You’ll look for it in vain in supermarkets. H.G. Walter, the upmarket London butcher, does ask for it, and gets it separately from the rest of the carcase. Charlie Hinds there observes that it has increased in popularity recently with restaurants and keen cooks, probably because of the renaissance in British cooking thanks to chefs such as Fergus Henderson.
It makes a lovely dripping (for which I’d just use the scraps) and has a high smoking point (so burns less easily than other fats). If your supplier kills his own beasts, you’re in business; I used to get it from my friend at the farmers’ market, who’d throw it in for nothing, but nowadays you can expect to pay at least a fiver for 500g. You can get it online if you don’t have a butcher.
Suet used to be the default ingredient for British puddings, notably steak and kidney, but sweet too. We can argue whether a nice log of plain suet pudding, boiled, in a puddle of golden syrup has the edge on a jam roly poly and whether a Sussex pond pudding (with a whole lemon plus sugar and butter in the middle) beats both, but really in winter, we should be eating all sorts. You can, if you try hard, find good steak and kidney pudding in old-fashioned restaurants such as Rules, but it takes a chef with a sense of tradition to get it out there. And let’s not forget dumplings, delicious in a stew or stewed apple.
I could add: eat responsibly, because it’s the kind of fat cardiologists warn you against – but you know that. It’s time, I say, for a suet renaissance. The British embrace foreign fats – Italian lardo, or pork fat, is quite the fashion – but just try finding decent lard or best suet. Suet is the counter-cultural ingredient: off-puttingly pasty on Instagram but so very delicious on the plate. Bring it back.
Ellen’s Christmas pudding
This is a simple recipe: no cherries, nuts or brandy – but it’s very good. The quantities below make a large pudding – if there’s not many of you, halve the quantities and use two small eggs or one large egg, and adjust the cooking time accordingly.
You will need
- Half a pound (225g) each of raisins, currants and sultanas (if you can get hold of dried raisins on the vine, use those, but remove stalks and pips)
- 4oz (115g) mixed peel
- 6oz (170g) brown sugar
- 12oz (340g) breadcrumbs
- 12oz (340g) plain flour
- A little spice
- 8oz (225g) grated suet
- Three eggs
- Half a pint of old beer
- A sixpence or the equivalent, wrapped in a bit of greaseproof paper
How to make it
- Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl, getting everyone you can find to pitch in.
- When thoroughly mixed, transfer to a large pudding basin (about 1.5 litre), stick the sixpence in the middle and put a double circle of greaseproof paper over the top of the mixture. Fasten a pudding cloth over the basin, making a small fold in the middle, and tie securely with string. (If any cloth hangs down, gather the ends up and secure them with a safety pin.)
- Put in a big saucepan, large enough for you to be able to top up the boiling water as needed, and boil for six hours.
- Allow to cool and store in a larder or cupboard.
- On Christmas Day, reheat by boiling for another three hours.
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