What Happened to Suet?

Search for suet in America and nearly every result has a woodpecker on it. Cakes of rendered beef fat in wire cages, sold by the pallet in garden centers, priced like birdseed. That same fat used to be the base of Thanksgiving mince pie, and the reason Christmas pudding comes out tender instead of a fruit brick.

Britain's Go-To Shortening for Centuries

Britain loves its suet. Especially 200 years ago.

We counted uses. In the first bound edition of Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, the 1861 volume that taught Victorian Britain how to run a kitchen, the word "suet" appears 162 times. In Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, 138 times. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, has entries titled "Suet-Dumplings" and "A Boiled Suet-Pudding" sitting in the table of contents like flour and salt.

These are not specialty recipes tucked in the back. Beeton has standalone entries for "Suet Crust, for Pies or Puddings" and "Suet Pudding, to serve with Roast Meat." It was their standard shortening, used in all sorts of baking.

That said, America used less of it than Britain did. Butter and lard were the workhorses here. But suet was in the house. Amelia Simmons put it in the first cookbook written by an American, in 1796. Lydia Maria Child, writing for thrifty households in the 1830s, gives storage advice: "Suet keeps good all the year round, if chopped and packed down in a stone jar, covered with molasses."

Mincemeat with the meat

In 1896, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book told American home cooks to start their Thanksgiving and Christmas mince pies with four pounds of lean beef and two pounds of beef suet. Not a spoonful for richness. Six pounds of beef and beef fat, as the base of the pie.

Mince Pie Meat, page 393 of the 1896 first edition. The English version printed below it opens with five pounds of suet.

Simmons was doing the same thing a century earlier, in 1796: four pounds of boiled beef, a pound of suet, six pounds of apple. And in Beeton's 1861 mincemeat, the suet outweighs the beef two to one, three pounds against one and a half. In a thing called mincemeat, the fat was the main event.

Christmas pudding is beef fat

It typically isn't made this way still, but originally, Christmas puddings used suet.

Beeton's "Christmas Plum-Pudding (Very Good)" is three quarters of a pound of suet against three quarters of a pound of breadcrumbs, with no flour in it at all. Acton's runs six ounces of beef kidney suet to three ounces of flour and three of breadcrumbs. In both puddings, the fat weighs as much as everything holding it together.

The origin is usually traced back to plum pottage, a loose porridge of meat, dried fruit and spice that nobody alive would recognize as dessert. It set into a cloth-boiled pudding over the seventeenth century, and the Victorians fixed it in place as the Christmas dish. Acton is usually credited with the first recipe printed under the name "Christmas Pudding," in 1845, though the pudding itself was well established before she named it.

Why cooks wanted it

Suet is the hard fat packed around the kidneys and loins. Melt it slowly, strain out the solids, and what is left is rendered beef fat, better known as tallow. Raw, it behaves nothing like the fat trimmed off a steak. It is drier and firmer. It crumbles rather than smears. USDA figures put raw suet at about 94 percent fat. Ordinary trim fat is roughly 71 percent, and most of that gap is water.

That firmness is why it earned its place. A suet pudding steams for hours. A softer fat melts out early and leaves the pudding greasy and dense. Suet holds its shape long enough for the batter to set around it, then melts and leaves the open, tender texture that made steamed puddings worth making. It was cheap, it was everywhere, and it gave a texture butter couldn't replicate.

Then America stopped

The reason you don't see it today is simple, shortenings. Crisco arrived in June 1911. Procter & Gamble sold it on purity. Factory cleanliness, neutral taste, shelf life. They published cookbooks where every single recipe called for Crisco, and a generation learned to cook without lard because the cookbook told them to.

The replacement was already on its way before the famous brand showed up. The 1896 Boston Cooking-School book teaches readers how to render their own suet and lists the new factory shortenings then coming to market, "cottolene, coto-suet," right alongside. The back matter carries a full-page advertisement for Cottolene. The book that taught America to render suet was already selling the thing that would replace it.

The ad in the back of the 1896 edition. Cottolene was cottonseed oil, and it sold itself under a trademark of "steer's head in cotton-plant wreath."

Crisco's pitch aimed at lard and butter, not at suet specifically. Suet was collateral damage. Then came the mid-century decades of alarm about saturated fat, and animal fats left the American kitchen more or less together.

The last stand was the french fry

For a while after home cooks quit, one enormous customer kept buying beef fat. McDonald's fried its potatoes in a blend of 93 percent beef tallow and 7 percent cottonseed oil. On July 23, 1990, the company announced it was switching to vegetable oil.

It had spent two years under fire from Phil Sokolof, an Omaha businessman who survived a heart attack and spent millions of his own money on full-page newspaper ads naming the chain directly over saturated fat. McDonald's credited eight years of its own research. Sokolof said he was elated.

People noticed immediately. The fries did not taste the same, because they were not the same. The replacement needed "natural beef flavoring," added at the plant where the potatoes are par-fried, to chase what the tallow had been doing for free. That flavoring later cost roughly ten million dollars in a settlement with vegetarian and Hindu customers who had not been told.

That was the last time most Americans ate beef fat regularly without knowing it.

Britain kept it on the shelf

Suet did not disappear. It disappeared here. A Manchester manufacturer, Gabriel Hugon, started shredding suet into a box in 1893 and registered a name for it soon after: Atora. The box is still sitting in ordinary supermarkets today. British mince pies still call for suet, though the commercial ones increasingly use the vegetarian version, made with vegetable oil in place of the beef fat. Christmas puddings too.

Atora shredded suet, still on British shelves. The side panel dates the brand to 1893. Photo: Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Britain cooks with a fraction of what Beeton did. The weekday steamed pudding died there as well, somewhere after the war. But nobody had to reintroduce the ingredient, because it never left the shelf or the Christmas table.

An ocean is the entire difference between a pantry staple and a forgotten thing.

And here, it went to the birds

Which brings us back to the wire cage.

The Cornell Lab's Project FeederWatch, in its guidance on what to put in a feeder, says it plainly: most suet is beef kidney fat. Which means the fat in those cakes is mostly the same cut, from the same place on the same animal, that Beeton put in a Christmas pudding and Fannie Farmer put in a Thanksgiving pie.

Suet never stopped working. We stopped asking it to, decided it was archaic, and handed it to the woodpeckers.

We still buy it. Every jar of our 100% grass-fed beef tallow starts as suet, slow-rendered in small batches with nothing added, because we think it is still the right fat for the job. What to actually do with it is a separate conversation.

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