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Cherry Roly-Poly
Make a baking powder biscuit dough as for Cream Fruit Rolls. (See Page 180.) Roll to one-half inch thickness. Drain pitted cherries from the juice; strew them over dough, sprinkle with sugar Third Sunday and dredge lightly with flour. Roll like a jelly roll, moisten and press the overlapping edge and close the ends as securely as possible. Bake in a hot oven, twenty-five minutes, basting three times with some of the cherry juice sweetened to taste, or tie loosely in a floured cloth and cook in boiling water two hours, or steam in a steamer one hour. Serve on a hot platter with Cherry Sauce.
A single dough with three finishes — baked, boiled in a cloth, or steamed. The baked version is the fastest and the only one that gives you a browned crust.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature. In cookbooks of this period "hot" is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F; twenty-five minutes at that sort of heat suits a half-inch dough rolled into a log.
- The hinge: dry the cherriesDrain the pitted cherries thoroughly, then sugar and dredge with flour as directed. Wet fruit steams the dough from inside, splits the seam and leaves a raw grey layer.
- Sealing the rollThe recipe says only to moisten and press the overlap and close the ends. Moistening with water and setting the roll seam-down are sensible precautions against the seam opening as the dough rises.
- BastingBaste with the sweetened juice three times, which works out at roughly eight-minute intervals across the twenty-five minutes; stopping before the last few minutes lets the surface dry and colour.
- If you boil itThe floured pudding cloth must be scalded, wrung out and dusted with flour while damp, tied loosely to let the dough swell, and kept fully covered by water at a steady boil for the whole two hours. Topping up with boiling water, not cold, keeps the pudding from going heavy.
- SteamingOne hour over rapidly boiling water, in a covered steamer, lid kept on. The result is pale and very soft — closer to a suet pudding in texture than to the baked roll.
- YieldOne roll; how many it serves depends on the page-180 dough, which is not given here. Serve hot; a roly-poly left to cool goes dense and the fruit sets.
The roly-poly is an English pudding -- a sheet of dough spread with jam or fruit, rolled, and boiled in a cloth -- and it reached American cookbooks with the cloth-boiling method intact, which is why this recipe still offers it. What is distinctly American here is the first option: a baking-powder biscuit dough baked dry in the oven, basted with fruit juice. Chemical leavening was widely used in American home baking by the late nineteenth century, and it turned a two-hour boiled pudding into a twenty-five-minute one. 52 Sunday Dinners assigns a menu to each week of the year, and the heading here reads only "Third Sunday"; the month is not stated on the page, though a cherry dish points to early summer. Cherry Sauce is called for at the end but is not given here.