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Suet, to Keep for Months
Take firm but perfectly sweet suet. Free it entirely from skin and fibre, and put it into a saucepan over a very gentle fire. Let it melt gradually. Pour it into a pan of cold water. When it is cold and hard, wipe it dry with a soft cloth, wrap it in paper, put it in a linen bag, and hang it in a cool dry place. Scrape it when it is wanted for use. Fresh suet will keep for several days if it is chopped fine with all the veiny pieces removed, then put into a jar, entirely covered with flour, and kept in a cool place.
This is a keeping method rather than a dish: gently rendered beef fat, cooled hard, and stored dry for use in puddings and pastry. Two things carry it — low heat and complete dryness afterwards.
- Keep the heat low"A very gentle fire" is the hinge. Render over the lowest burner setting, or in a 250F oven, until the fat is clear and only papery cracklings remain. Any browning gives the fat a roasted flavour that will follow it into a sweet pudding, and scorched fat turns rancid faster.
- "Perfectly sweet" means not rancidIn this period sweet describes fat that is fresh and clean-smelling, with no sourness or cheesy note. Old suet cannot be rescued by rendering; the off flavour concentrates.
- What suet actually isThe hard, crumbly fat from around beef kidneys, quite distinct from soft back or trimming fat. Ask a butcher for beef kidney suet; supermarket "suet" in a box is usually shredded fat cut with flour or rice flour, and vegetarian versions are palm and sunflower oil. Neither behaves the same in a rendering pan.
- Skin and fibreRemoving membrane and the veiny pieces is not fussiness. Connective tissue holds water and blood, and both shorten keeping life considerably.
- The cold water bathPouring the melted fat into cold water sets it into a clean cake and leaves residual solids and impurities behind in the water. Wipe it genuinely dry afterwards; trapped moisture is the one thing that will spoil an otherwise stable block.
- Storage nowWell-rendered tallow is low in moisture and highly saturated, and a cool larder was reasonable in an unheated house. In a centrally heated kitchen, wrap it and keep it in the refrigerator for several months or the freezer for a year. The flour-covered fresh suet in the second half of the entry is a short-term trick only — treat it as a few days in the fridge, not a preserve.
- Using it"Scrape it" means shaving flakes off the block with a knife; a coarse box grater does the job faster, and the fat grates best straight from the refrigerator. For pastry and suet crust, keep the shreds cold until they hit the flour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, but as a rough guide raw suet loses something like a quarter to a third of its weight in trimmings and moisture, so 2 lb of raw kidney fat gives roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 lb of hard rendered fat.
Suet was one of the standard solid fats of the British kitchen before hydrogenated shortening and cheap refrigeration, and it sat behind a whole family of dishes — steamed puddings, mincemeat, dumplings, suet crust for steak and kidney. Because it is highly saturated and nearly free of water once rendered, it keeps better than butter or lard: a household bought fat when the butcher had it and made it last. Commercially shredded suet, cut with flour, appears in British shops from around the 1890s, and rendering your own became progressively less common through the twentieth century. The flour-packing note at the end belongs to the same logic as burying eggs in salt or covering potted meat with butter — exclude air, exclude damp, buy a few more days.