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Raisin Roly Poly
2 cups flour, 2 cups breadcrumbs, 3/4 cup Crisco, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/4 pound stoned raisins, 1/4 tablespoon salt, and cold water. Rub Crisco well into flour, breadcrumbs, sugar, salt, and add raisins stoned and halved. Add enough water to mix whole into soft paste. Roll into neat shape. Roll up in floured and scalded pudding cloth, tying ends securely. Put in pan of fast boiling water, and let boil steadily for 3 hours. Take off cloth, and serve pudding on hot dish.
A plain boiled pudding of the British nursery type, with Crisco standing in for the suet the dish was originally built on. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth-boiling method needs a little translating.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingThe pudding cooks by steam trapped inside a wet cloth, and a batch that goes off the boil turns dense and grey at the centre. Keep a kettle of boiling water alongside and top the pan up as it evaporates, never with cold water.
- Scalding the clothDip a clean cotton or linen cloth in boiling water, wring it out, then flour the damp surface generously. The wet flour forms a skin that keeps water out of the dough. A cloth used dry will let the pudding waterlog.
- If you have no pudding clothA 1.5-quart pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, tied down and steamed in a covered pan of simmering water, works too; allow at least the full three hours and check that the centre is set. The shape will be a dome rather than a log.
- "Stoned raisins"Pitted. Raisins in 1915 frequently arrived with seeds in and had to be slit and cleaned by hand; modern seedless raisins need only halving, or not even that.
- 1/4 tablespoon saltRead this as a scant teaspoon: a quarter of a tablespoon is three-quarters of a teaspoon.
- Crisco and its textureCrisco is why this recipe exists, and it works, but rub it in while cold and stop when the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Worked warm it smears and the pudding loses its crumbly bite. Chilled butter or shredded suet substitute both behave better if you have them.
- Water quantityThe original leaves it open because breadcrumbs vary enormously in dryness. Start with about 3/4 cup of cold water and add by tablespoons until the mass just coheres into a soft, non-sticky paste.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is dull on its own by modern standards and wants custard, a hot lemon or brandy sauce, or simply cream and brown sugar. Slice it thick, across the roll, while very hot.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911; every recipe in it is an argument that the new fat could do whatever butter, lard or suet had done. A roly-poly is the classic British boiled pudding dash; a suet paste rolled around fruit or jam, wrapped in a floured cloth and boiled for hours in the same pot as the rest of dinner dash; and swapping suet for Crisco was exactly the sort of substitution the book existed to demonstrate, since suet was the fat most closely associated with heavy, old-fashioned cookery. This version is unusually plain, with the raisins mixed through the paste rather than rolled inside it, so it is a roly-poly more in shape and method than in filling. It appears under a section headed "Eggs," though the dish contains none.