[Sca-cooks] lard

[Alexander Clark]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011 14:11:38 -0800, Patricia Dunham
<chimene at ravensgard.org> wrote:
> OK, I'll file that idea in the back of my head...  the Hispanic grocery one.
>   We have several of those in town these days.
>
> Of course what I was looking for a couple of years ago was not lard, but
> SUET.  Anybody know if a Hispanic grocery might be a reasonable source for
> that?  My grandmother's (at least Victorian) recipe for mincemeat (with
> meat, of course) calls for it.  I tried making it for the first time 2-3
> years ago and could not find suet ANYWHERE, including our usual local local
> real butchers'.  Ended up in the industrial district at one of the two
> large-scale butchers in town and they took a chunk of white stuff off a side
> of beef for me and I ground it myself.  (The difference in scale:  the local
> local guys have a retail operation and, like, cut hunks down into chops and
> steaks; the large-scale guys take apart carcasses into the big-hunks the
> local-locals finish.)

My understanding is that there are several kinds of suet available, if
you know where to look. Some is for feeding birds, and this is not
recommended for cooking. The best kind for mincemeat (and pudding)
might be kidney suet, which is roughly analogous to leaf lard, taken
from the dorsal part of the abdominal cavity.

-- 
Henry/Alex