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Cherry Roly Poly
Roll pastry or a baking powder biscuit dough very thin, about 1/8 of an inch in thickness, sprinkle with sugar, and dot with ripe stoned cherries. Roll like a jelly roll, press, and close the ends as tight as possible. Tie in a floured cloth, and cook in boiling water 2 hours, or steam in steamer 1 hour. Remove from cloth and serve on hot platter with the following sauce: 1/2 cup Crisco, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 egg yolk, 2 tablespoons wine, and 2 egg whites. Cream Crisco; add sugar, yolk of egg and wine. Cook over hot water until hot. Remove from fire and add beaten whites of eggs.
A boiled suet-style roly poly made with biscuit dough or pastry, served with a creamed foam sauce. The original assumes a floured pudding cloth and a cook who knows how tightly to roll it.
- CriscoThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening. In the sauce, use softened unsalted butter for a richer result, or any solid shortening if you want the neutral flavour the original intended.
- The hinge: seal the endsWater will get into the roll at the seams and turn the dough to paste. Pinch the long seam, fold the ends over and press them hard, then wrap the cloth loosely enough to allow swelling but tie both ends off tightly.
- The clothA clean cotton or linen tea towel, dipped in boiling water, wrung out, then floured on the inside. The flour forms a skin that keeps the dough from sticking. Keep the water at a steady boil the whole time and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- Steam rather than boilThe one-hour steaming option is the better of the two: less risk of a waterlogged crust, and biscuit dough of this thickness is fully cooked well inside that time. Two hours of boiling is generous for a thin roll and reflects older, heavier suet puddings.
- CherriesThe recipe says only 'ripe stoned cherries.' Sour cherries (Montmorency-type) were generally the baking cherry of the period and want more sugar than sweet ones; taste and adjust. Drain them well, because free juice will soak through 1/8-inch dough and stain the cloth.
- Unspecified quantitiesNo amount of dough, sugar or fruit is given. As a starting point, a batch of biscuit dough from about 2 cups flour rolls out to roughly the right size, with about 2 cups of stoned cherries and 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar; that should serve around six.
- The wine'Wine' in a dessert sauce of this period most often meant a fortified wine such as sherry, Madeira or Marsala, though the recipe does not say. Two tablespoons is a flavouring, not a soaking.
- Raw egg whites in the sauceThe yolk is warmed over hot water but the beaten whites go in off the heat and are never cooked. If you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, use pasteurised whites or whip cream in instead of the meringue.
- ServingSlice the roll thick with a serrated knife on a hot platter and spoon the sauce over at the table; the sauce slackens as it sits and is best made just before serving.
The roly poly belongs to the family of English boiled puddings, made by rolling a suet or biscuit dough around jam or fruit, wrapping it in a floured cloth and boiling it in a single pot -- a technique that predates reliable domestic ovens and long outlived them. Its appearance here, in a 1910s American calendar of dinners published to advertise a new vegetable shortening, catches the form at the moment of changeover: the pudding is still boiled in a cloth in the old way, but the sauce is creamed from a manufactured fat rather than butter or beef suet. Cherry versions were seasonal by definition, tied to the short summer window when sour cherries came in and households preserved or used them at once.