Vegetable suet?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have been on a ‘traditional’ English breakfast kick for a while now. Arteries be damned, I like English food!

So I am going to try to make some ‘Oxford Sausage’ for my next proper breakfast. One of the ingredients is ‘shredded suet’. I then found out that suet is the hard fat found around the kidneys. Good Lord that is digusting. I am not going to touch that stuff with my bare hands.
(I know that I eat far worse things on a daily basis. But I don’t know the gristly details what I am eating, so ignorance is bliss, so long as it tastes good!.)

My questions are:

  1. Will substituting vegetable suet for the real-deal significantly change the flavor?

  2. Is vegetable suet available here in America? I googled it a bit, and almost every link was either to bird-feeding sites (Mmmmm…tasty sparrow!) or to British sites.
    One of these days I’ll work up the courage to try black pudding…

2

In answer to the first question , most commercial products on sale here in the UK ( such as Christmas puddings and mince meat ) contain vegetarian suet and are marked " suitable for vegetarians" . I have not noticed any change in the taste compared with using proper suet. So go ahead with if you can find the product. We do use the " real " suet at home when making dumplings etc. but that’s just traditional on our part I suppose. Both types , in shredded form ,are on sale here.