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Cranberry Pudding
Steam one quart of cranberries, with one half cup of water and two cups sugar, then make one quart of baking powder biscuit dough in the usual way, and roll out about half an inch thick, and spread the cranberries when cool on it, roll it over and over as you would a rolly polly pudding; butter the steamer, put it in and steam one hour. To be eaten with a rich sauce, mix a little of the cranberry juice in the same.
A steamed roly-poly in the British manner, with New England cranberries standing in for jam and American baking-powder dough standing in for suet crust. The instructions assume a cook who has made one before, so a few things need filling in.
- A quart of cranberriesThat is about 4 cups, or roughly a pound — a little more than one standard 12-ounce supermarket bag. With half a cup of water and two cups of sugar they will collapse into a thick, jammy mass as they steam and burst.
- A quart of dough is ambiguousThe original measures dough by finished volume, which no modern recipe does. A biscuit dough built on 3 to 4 cups of flour (with the usual baking powder, salt, fat and milk) rolls out to roughly the right sheet; err on the smaller side, since an overlarge roll steams unevenly.
- Let the filling cool completelyThe recipe says "when cool" and means it. Warm cranberry jam melts the fat in the biscuit dough on contact and the roll turns greasy and slumps as you lift it.
- Leave a border and seal itSpread the fruit to within an inch of the edges, and pinch the long seam and both ends firmly before you set it in the steamer. Cranberry syrup that escapes will weld the pudding to the pan.
- The steamerAny deep pot with a rack and a tight lid will do. Butter the surface the roll sits on, keep the water at a steady simmer below the pudding rather than touching it, and top up with boiling — never cold — water so the steam never stops. Cold water added mid-cook checks the rise.
- An hour is about rightThe dough is chemically leavened, not yeasted, so it is done when it is firm and dry to the touch and a skewer comes out clean of raw dough. Unlike a suet pudding, longer steaming buys you nothing.
- The "rich sauce"The phrase is not explained, but in books of this kind it usually points to a hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and a little cream or spirit) or a warm butter-and-sugar pouring sauce. Slackening it with a spoonful of the cranberry juice, as directed, gives it colour and cuts the sweetness.
- YieldServes six to eight, cut into thick slices at the table. It is best warm; reheat leftovers in steam rather than a dry oven, which toughens the crust.
The roly-poly is an English steamed pudding — a sheet of suet pastry spread with jam, rolled, and boiled in a floured cloth. Two changes show in this version: the suet crust becomes baking-powder biscuit dough, quick to mix and needing no shredded beef fat, and the jam becomes cranberries, a tart fruit that keeps through a northern winter and turns up in American cookbooks more often than in English ones. Chemical leavening made this substitution possible; commercial baking powder was widely available in American kitchens from the later nineteenth century, and this recipe's call for "baking powder biscuit dough in the usual way" treats it as a pantry staple rather than something needing a recipe. The result reads as British in shape and American in its fruit.