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Jam Roly-Poly Pudding
Shred five or six ounces of beef suet very finely; mix with it one pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of baking-powder. Make it up into a firm paste with cold water; then roll it out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, wet the edges all round, and spread half a pound of jam over the pastry. Roll it to the shape of a bolster, fasten the edges securely, and put the pudding into a floured cloth. Tie it at both ends, put it into boiling water without bending it, and let it boil quickly for about two hours. Send melted butter to table in a tureen. Imitation jam (see JAM, IMITATION) makes a good pudding for the nursery. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain suet paste boiled in a cloth — the technique is the whole recipe, and it depends on keeping water at a hard boil around a well-sealed roll.
- The hinge: seal and boil hardThe jam will find any weak seam and leak into the water, leaving a pale, hollow pudding. Leave a clear inch of bare paste at each end and along the long edge, press the wetted edges firmly, and keep the water at a rolling boil the whole time — a slack simmer lets water seep through the cloth into the crust.
- SuetFresh beef suet shredded from the kidney fat is what is meant; packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetable) works directly and needs no preparation. If using a block, freeze it and grate it coarsely, then toss it through the flour so the shreds stay separate.
- Proportions in modern terms1 lb flour is about 3½ cups; 5–6 oz suet is roughly 1¼ cups shredded. Cold water to a firm paste will be somewhere near 300 ml / 1¼ cups, but add it in stages — the dough should hold together without being sticky.
- Baking powderHalf a teaspoon to a pound of flour is a very light lift by current standards, and nineteenth-century baking powders varied in strength from maker to maker. Increasing to two teaspoons of modern baking powder, or using self-raising flour, will give a softer, more spongy crust of the kind now generally associated with roly-poly.
- The clothScald a square of unbleached cotton or a clean tea towel, wring it out, and flour the damp surface generously — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Roll the pudding up loosely with a pleat down the middle to allow for swelling, then tie the ends like a cracker.
- Boiling without bendingA 1 lb-flour roll is long. Use the widest pan you have, or curve it into a fish kettle; bending it in the pan will crack the crust and release the jam. If nothing fits, halve the quantity and make two shorter puddings, reducing the boiling to about 1¼ hours.
- Steaming insteadTwo hours of hard boiling needs topping up with boiling water, never cold. A wrapped roll can instead be steamed over water with less attention, though it will usually need rather longer than the boiled two hours and the crust comes out slightly softer.
- Melted butter in a tureenIn Cassell's this means the old English melted butter — butter thickened with a little flour and water into a pourable sauce, not simply liquid butter. Custard or plain cream is the more usual accompaniment now.
- YieldFour generous portions, as stated. It is very filling; six is realistic after a main course.
Suet puddings boiled in a cloth were a mainstay of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the jam version belongs to the later part of that story — it depended on cheap sugar and factory jam, both of which reached ordinary households in quantity only in the nineteenth century. Cassell's costing of tenpence for a pudding that fed four shows exactly why it earned its place: flour, suet and jam were among the cheapest calories available, and the cloth-boiled method needed no oven, which mattered in kitchens where the range was lit only at certain hours. The name is generally traced to the rolling of the paste, with "poly" as a rhyming flourish; the shape gave rise to the schoolroom nicknames "dead man's arm" and "dead man's leg", which are often said to come from boiling the pudding in an old shirtsleeve, though that explanation is anecdotal. The reference to imitation jam "for the nursery" is a reminder of a period when jam was frequently adulterated or stretched with turnip, apple pulp and glucose, and cookery books — Cassell's among them, as the cross-reference shows — gave recipes for making such substitutes deliberately at home.