Bring back suet!

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.