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Roly-Poly Pudding
The pastry for this favourite pudding may be made in three or four ways, according to the degree of richness required. For a superior pudding mix a pound of flour with half a pound of very finely-shredded suet, freed from skin and fibre. Add a good pinch of salt, an egg, and nearly half a pint of milk. Roll out three or four times. For a plainer pudding, mix five or six ounces of suet with a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, and make a paste by stirring in half a pint of water. When suet is objected to, rub six ounces of butter or six ounces of sweet dripping into a pound of flour, and proceed as before. When a smaller quantity still of dripping is used, addition of a spoonful of baking-powder will help to make the pastry light. Roll out the dough to a long thin form, a quarter of an inch thick, and of a width to suit the size of the saucepan in which it is to be boiled. Spread over it a layer of any kind of jam, and be careful that it does not reach the edges of the pastry. Begin at one end, and roll it up to fasten the jam inside, moisten the edges, and press them securely together. Dip a cloth in boiling water, flour it well, and tie the pudding tightly in it. Plunge it into a saucepan of boiling water, at the bottom of which a plate has been laid to keep the pudding from burning, and boil quickly until done enough. If it is necessary to add more water, let it be put in boiling. Marmalade, treacle, sliced lemon and sugar, lemon-juice and sugar, chopped apples and currants, either separately or together, may be used instead of jam for a change. Time to boil the pudding, one hour and a half to two hours, according to the size.
A boiled suet roll, and the method is sound as written — the only real hurdles are the imperial measures and the pudding cloth.
- The hinge: keep the jam off the edgesLeave a clear inch of bare pastry all round. Jam that reaches the seam melts, forces the join open in the water, and you lose the filling into the pan.
- Imperial pints and gillsImperial pints -- An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups; "nearly half a pint" of milk means roughly a scant cup plus two tablespoons. Add the last of it by feel — you want a firm, just-cohesive paste, not a slack one.
- SuetShredded beef suet from a butcher, chilled hard and grated, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet (Atora and similar) works directly; the recipe's "freed from skin and fibre" step is already done for you. Frozen grated butter is a common substitute at the same weight.
- Sweet drippingRendered beef or pork fat kept from roasting, and "sweet" means fresh rather than sugared — rancid dripping was the common fault. Lard or shortening behaves the same way in the pastry.
- Rolling out three or four timesFor the rich version this is probably a rough flaky-pastry treatment: roll, fold, turn, repeat. The recipe does not describe the folding, and the richer version's lighter eating may owe as much to the egg and the greater proportion of suet.
- Cloth or parchmentA floured, scalded cotton cloth is traditional and still works; the recipe says to tie the pudding tightly, though a little room along the roll allows for swelling. Parchment and foil wrapped in a loose parcel, then tied, is easier to handle and less prone to sticking.
- The plate in the panAn upturned heatproof saucer or a folded cloth on the bottom keeps the pudding off direct heat. Top up with boiling water only — cold water stalls the cooking and can make the crust heavy.
- Steaming insteadIf your pan is too small for the roll, steam it over water for the same time, or a little longer. It will be paler and softer-crusted than a boiled one.
- Yield and timingA pound of flour makes a substantial roll for six to eight. Ninety minutes suits a modest pudding, two hours a thick one; the crust should feel firm and springy through the cloth. Serve hot in thick slices with custard or cream — it goes stodgy as it cools.
Roly-poly belongs to the long English line of boiled suet puddings, which took their modern form once the pudding cloth replaced the animal-gut bag in the seventeenth century and let cooks boil a pudding of any shape they liked. It was foundational household economy: flour, fat, water and whatever preserve was in the larder, cooked in the same pot that was already on the fire. The graded set of pastries here — egg and milk and half a pound of suet at the top, plain flour-and-water paste at the bottom, with baking powder to rescue the leanest version — is a fair picture of how Victorian recipe books wrote for several incomes at once. The nicknames it collected in barracks and schools, such as dead man's arm or dead man's leg from the shape of the cloth-wrapped roll, are traditional rather than documented to any single source.