I just read the column on where the name “spotted dick” came from. What really struck me about the column is that the dessert is a type of suet pudding. Which leads to the inevitable question, why on earth do the British consider suet to be a dessert? When I think of pudding yummy things like chocolate, banana, vanilla, butterscotch, rice, bread, molasses (treacle in the UK), and others come to mind. But beef or mutton fat just doesn’t leap out!
Hopefully some on the anglophiles on the board can enlighten me.
It’s not as though we’re sitting down to a plate of suet. Suet puddings are made with pastry, the fat content of which is suet, which gives a light, spongey texture. The yumminess is provided by whatever the pastry’s wrapped around.
Perhaps I’m out of touch, but I hadn’t heard that smug ignorance was now considered the highest form of politeness. I suppose “LOL” makes it all okay.
Would you be equally puzzled by a butter pudding*? Suet is a cheaper, more readily available fat than butter, and it also has somewhat different cooking properties. It’s used in desserts for the same reason American pies and pastries traditionally used lard, before hydrogenated vegetable fats became a thing.
note that this is the English definition of pudding, meaning essentially a rich, sweet, steamed bread, typically with fruit in it.
My understanding is that my grandmother, in Lansing Michigan, thought chicken fat best for cookies 100 years ago.
Since cheap and nasty chocolate uses palm oil based fat, and expensive chocolate uses “white chocolate”, and milk chocolate uses butter fat, I’ve long wondered if lard or tallow would give a better result than palm oil.
…The requirement for chocolate is that it melt at about body temperature – so it’s solid on the shelf, but melts in your mouth. Butter fat has a lower melting temperature, so it’s not as good for chocolate. Animal fats would, I guess, have a higher melting temperature than body temperature (not as good for chocolate, but better for cooking) but would perhaps be a complex mixture, and might be processed. Palm oil is just unpleasant.
If you don’t have chicken fat for you cookies, I understand that refrigerating the cookie dough has a similar effect.
Suet and lard were the primary fats used in all cooking just two generations ago. Most milk was left whole. Separating the cream and then turning that into butter were highly labor intensive processes and seldom used for baking.
My Grandmother swore that the only way to make good pastry was to use goose fat. I tried it last Christmas, and I have to say I liked it, although keeping it cold enough was a serious pain. When she couldn’t find goose fat she used “leaf lard” which is the highest grade of pork fat. She once tried schmaltz but hated the outcome. She also occasionally used Cod Liver Oil, but only for the purposes of torturing children.
A lot of people use “lard” and “suet” interchangeably, but it actually refers exclusively to pork fat. Beef and sheep fat can be called tallow or suet.
About two weeks before my mother passed away, her sister came to visit her. I drove out with my family to Mom and Dad’s house to see her, and one of my sisters gave me a chocolate chip cookie that my aunt had made a batch of. They were pretty delicious, and it’s my understanding that she had made them with POTATO CHIPS.
Ya gotcher salt, ya gotcher fat, ya gotcher finely milled carbohydrate.No reason to leave potato chips out, I guess. Although I suspect that there was also some wheat flour used, as well as some other form of fat.
Lard doesn’t sound like a very appealing dessert ingredient, either, yet apple pie remains a popular American dessert. You don’t have to make pie crust with lard, but in my recent attempts to make it from scratch, it makes a pretty good crust. It’s also delicious to take the scraps, top with cinnamon sugar, and bake. But yeah, lard, ewww…
I came across spotted dick (the spots being raisins) in 19th century naval books. I had believed that suet was used because there wasn’t much to cook with on a sailing vessel many days at sea. Ignorance has been fought.
My [English] mother always made her mincemeat with beef suet. She also made suet pastry for both sweet and savory pies and puddings. Wickedly delicious!
Unlike haute French, California or molecular gastronomy cuisine that you can’t eat without raising your pinky, traditional English cuisine is unpretentious, filling and simply scrumptious. The trope of English cuisine being poor is completely undeserved. Mom’s party and pot luck covered dishes were always the first to be consumed and celebrated by appreciative Americans (and the french, polish and dutch ladies in her WWII war-bride club).
What I wouldn’t give for another portion of her mincemeat pie … steak & kidney pie … shepherd’s pie … sausage rolls … raspberry pastries … Birds custard trifle … mixed grill breakfast … bubble & squeak … pot roast & pudding … I’ll stop here or the saliva will short out my keyboard.
(not as good for chocolate, but better for cooking) but would perhaps be a complex mixture, and might be processed. Palm oil is just unpleasant.