# Vegetable suet?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegetable-suet/149577>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 19, 2003, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegetable-suet/149577 "2003-01-19T03:09:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Brutus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/91b2a8/32.png) [@Brutus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brutus)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegetable-suet/149577/1 "2003-01-19T03:09:40Z")

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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…

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**Author:** ![Rayne\_Man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/df705f/32.png) [@Rayne\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rayne_Man)\
**Post date:** [January 19, 2003, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegetable-suet/149577/2 "2003-01-19T14:51:15Z")

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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.