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Orange Roley Poley
Make a light pastry as for apple dumplings, roll in oblong sheets and lay oranges peeled, sliced, and seeded, thickly all over it; sprinkle with white sugar; scatter over all a tea-spoon or two of grated orange-peel, and roll up, folding down the edges closely to keep the syrup from running out; boil in a cloth one and one-half hours. Eat with lemon-sauce prepared as follows: Six eggs, leaving out the whites of two, half pound butter, one pound sugar, juice of two lemons and rind of both grated; place over a slow fire, stir till it thickens like honey. Very nice. - Mrs. A. E. Walsh, Nashville, Tenn.
Two recipes in one: a boiled suet-style roll and what we would now call lemon curd. The sauce is where the attention goes, since it is the only part that can actually be ruined.
- The hinge: the lemon sauce must not boilSix yolks-and-four-whites with butter and sugar is lemon curd, and it curdles above roughly 180F. Cook it in a bowl over simmering water, stirring constantly, and pull it at the point it coats the spoon — "thickens like honey" is exactly right. If it does break, a quick pass through a sieve saves most of it.
- "Light pastry as for apple dumplings"Likely a rich biscuit-type crust — flour, baking powder or soda, a good deal of butter or chopped suet, milk to bind — rather than puff pastry or modern pie dough. Roll it about a quarter-inch thick so it can stretch around the fruit without splitting.
- Boiling in a clothFlour a scalded cotton or linen cloth generously, roll the pudding in it loosely enough to allow swelling, tie both ends, and keep it fully submerged in gently boiling water for the whole 90 minutes, topping up with boiling water as needed. A pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, steamed the same length of time, gives the same result with far less anxiety.
- Sealing the endsThe instruction to fold the edges down closely is not decorative. Orange juice and melted sugar will find any gap, and once syrup escapes into the water the roll boils rather than steams and turns to paste.
- The orangesSeeding mattered more in 1877 than now; navel oranges are seedless. Slice them crosswise, then drain the slices for a few minutes on a towel.
- Grated orange peelZest only the colored layer, and scrub or use unwaxed fruit, since modern supermarket citrus is often coated. A teaspoon or two is a light hand.
- Weights in the sauceHalf a pound of butter is two sticks, one pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups. That makes roughly a quart of sauce — far more than one pudding needs. Halving it is sensible, and the remainder keeps a week refrigerated.
- YieldOne roll on a standard sheet of pastry serves six to eight, cut in thick slices. Serve it hot, with the sauce warm but not hot enough to thin out.
The roly-poly — jam, suet crust, boiled in a floured cloth — is a fixture of nineteenth-century English cookery that crossed into American books as a cheap, filling pudding requiring no oven, which mattered a great deal in kitchens where the stove was already occupied or where there was only a hearth kettle. Substituting oranges for jam marks this as a contributed showpiece rather than everyday fare: winter citrus is generally said to have reached inland American cities by rail sometime in the later nineteenth century, but was still costly enough to be worth a recipe under someone's name. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled from just such contributions, and the credit to Mrs. A. E. Walsh of Nashville is typical of how the book gathered dishes from well beyond Ohio. The lemon sauce is a curd by an older name; "lemon cheese" and "lemon butter" were among the terms in use in this period, and the same mixture was used interchangeably as a pudding sauce, a tart filling and a spread.