Roly Poly
Procure a good round steak, and after beating thoroughly well, lay flat on a board; make a dressing of Irish potato, mashed fine, bread crumbs, a small piece of butter, some minced parsley, minced onion, salt and pepper. Spread this mixture on the steak, roll over and over like jelly cake, and fasten with skewers or sewing. Place in a baking tin with a little water, place in a hot oven, and baste every few minutes. Sift over the top browned cracker crumbs-serve with tomato or Hollandaise sauce.
A stuffed and rolled beef roast, given here in the compressed style of turn-of-the-century cookbooks that assumed the cook already knew the method. The gaps worth filling are the cut, the oven, and the timing.
- The cut"Round steak" here means a single thick slice off the round, about 1 to 1.5 lb, which the cook then pounds thin. Ask a butcher for a top round steak butterflied and pounded to roughly 1/4 inch, or buy thin-cut round and overlap two pieces to make a rectangle.
- Beating it thoroughlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Round is lean and full of connective tissue; without serious mechanical tenderising it will roll up into something rubbery. Pound to an even quarter inch across the whole surface, not just the middle.
- "Irish potato"Simply a white potato, as distinct from a sweet potato — a distinction that mattered in American Southern kitchens of the period. One medium potato, boiled and mashed dry, with about a cup of breadcrumbs, binds enough filling for a 1.5 lb steak.
- A hot ovenIn period usage this generally meant something in the range of 400-450F. Start high for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder, or the lean beef will be dry before it is tender.
- TimingThe original gives none. Expect 1 to 1.5 hours covered, plus the initial hot spell. Round rolled this way is braising meat, not roasting meat: it wants to reach well past 160F internal so the collagen breaks down. Keep water in the pan and cover with foil after browning.
- FasteningSkewers work, but butcher's twine tied at 1-inch intervals holds the roll rounder and slices more cleanly. Remove before carving.
- Cracker crumbsAdd these near the end, in the last 10 minutes and with the cover off. Sifted on at the start they absorb the basting liquid and go pasty.
- YieldServes four. Slice across the roll about 3/4 inch thick so each portion shows the spiral.
Roly poly is an English pudding name — a sheet of suet paste spread with jam and rolled up — borrowed here for a savoury meat dish on the strength of the shape alone; the recipe's own comparison to "jelly cake" suggests the roll was what the name was meant to convey. Rolled and stuffed beef of this kind is old and widespread, turning up as beef olives or beef birds in British cookery and later as braciole and rouladen in immigrant American kitchens. Its appeal to a household cookbook of this period is economic: the round is among the cheaper cuts on the animal, tough and lean, and pounding it flat around a bulky potato-and-breadcrumb dressing stretches a pound or so of beef across a family table while the long moist bake does the tenderising. The suggestion of Hollandaise as an alternative to tomato sauce reads as a touch of the period's genteel French borrowing, sitting a little oddly on top of a thrift dish.