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Peach Rolls
Stew dried fruit, sweeten, and flavor to taste; make a good baking-powder crust, roll very thin, spread fruit on, putting thin slices of butter on the fruit, roll crust up, place in a pan four or five inches deep, to three or four rolls add one cup sugar, and a half cup butter; pour in hot water enough to cover them. Bake half an hour. - Mrs. J. D. Simmons, Pontotoe, Miss.
A self-saucing baked dumpling: the crust is rolled around stewed fruit and baked submerged in sweetened water, which reduces to a syrup. The one thing to get right is the liquid — too little and the rolls scorch, too much and the pastry never sets.
- The dried fruitDried peaches fit the title, and apples or apricots work the same way. Cover the dried fruit with water, simmer until plump and soft (20-30 minutes), then sweeten and drain well — wet filling will make the crust soggy from the inside.
- "A good baking-powder crust"A baking-powder crust of this period runs roughly 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, half a teaspoon salt, 3-4 tablespoons butter or lard cut in, and enough milk to make a soft dough. It is a biscuit dough, not a pie pastry, and should be handled quickly and lightly.
- Rolling thinAn eighth of an inch is thin enough. Any thicker and the interior of the roll stays raw where it sits in the liquid; the dough swells considerably as the baking powder works.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as the recipe assumes a wood range. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits it. The recipe says half an hour; the underside sitting in the syrup may need longer — test by lifting one roll and checking the bottom crust.
- The sugar, butter and waterThe cup of sugar and half cup of butter go into the pan with the rolls, not the filling. Pour hot water to just cover, no deeper; the sugar and butter melt into it and reduce to a thin syrup as the rolls bake and rise clear of the surface.
- The panFour or five inches deep is not optional — the rolls rise and the liquid bubbles. A deep 9x13 baking dish or a Dutch oven suits three or four rolls. Set it on a sheet pan to catch spills.
- YieldThree or four rolls serve six to eight, sliced crosswise and spooned over with the pan syrup. Best eaten warm, within an hour or two of baking, while the crust still has some structure.
Fruit rolled in biscuit dough and baked in sweetened liquid appears across nineteenth-century American cookbooks under a shifting set of names — peach roll, apple roly-poly, fruit dumpling — and the technique is essentially a thrifty way to stretch a small amount of preserved fruit with a large amount of flour. Dried peaches were a staple of the Southern pantry well into the twentieth century, sun-dried in summer and stored for the months when nothing fresh was to be had. Buckeye Cookery, which grew out of an earlier Ohio church compilation and whose first edition's date and place are given differently by different sources, was assembled from contributions sent in by housekeepers across the country, and is full of these attributed one-paragraph recipes; they assume a cook who already knows what a baking-powder crust is and needs only the proportions of sugar, butter and water peculiar to this particular dish.