Delia's mincemeat

Any good revipes for vegetarian mincemeat please?!

Surely the only animal material in mincemeat is suet and this can just be replaced with vegetarian suet, which is in every supermarket that I have looked in, on the shelf next to the meat based suet.

That means you can use any standard mincemeat recipe you wish with this one substitution.

humpty you probably never look at the suet in the supermarkets so probably had no idea you could get vegetarian. I think it may be quite a new thing as it surprised me.

Vegetarian suet has been around for a 10 or 20 years. My sister was a vegetarian for many years and I used it to make Christmas puddings when she was with us over Christmas. She began eating meat again at least a decade ago.

MOnica, has it always been in all the supermarkets? I only saw it for the first time this year.

Yes, I am pretty sure it has been available in supermarkets for well over 10 years. I would only have come across it in Sainsbury's or Waitrose.

I have done a bit of googling and the earliest reference I can find to it is in The Guardian in 2005 when Rose Prince refers to vegetarians using vegetable suet to make mincemeat. It was a casual reference, so it was clearly generally available then and nothing unusual.

Vegetarian suet has been around for many years. Both my dils are vegetarian and I've been using it in recipes for them for over 15 years and I know I used it prior to that. It wasn't easy to get back then, though - I had to buy it when I saw it!

I live and learn! Don't buy suet very often and clearly not with my eyes open.

I usually just buy it at xmas for the pud. If I bought it all year round Id just eat dumplings all year round until I was dumpling-shaped too!

I made dumplings with it, they were not the same.
Perhaps my imagination but I could taste the difference.

I'm not sure I've ever had a beef suet dumpling. My mum never made dumplings and I've only made them since vegetarian suet became a thing. Maybe beef ones would taste even better!