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Sugar Roly-Poly
Make a good suet crust; roll it out as is usual in making roly-poly pudding, and instead of jam spread brown sugar upon it. Finish in the usual way, or send melted butter sweetened with sugar and flavoured with vinegar or lemon-juice to table with it.
A shorthand recipe of the kind Cassell's used constantly: it assumes you already know how to make suet crust and roll a roly-poly, and only tells you what goes inside. Here is what the assumptions were.
- The suet crustStandard Victorian proportions are twice the weight of flour to suet: 8 oz plain flour, 4 oz shredded beef suet, a teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and about 5-6 tablespoons cold water to a soft but not sticky dough. Vegetable suet works identically; butter grated frozen is a fair substitute but gives a shorter, less springy crust.
- Roll thin, leave a borderRoll to a rectangle about 1/4 in thick, spread the sugar to within an inch of the edges, then damp the border and pinch it closed after rolling. Sugar liquefies completely in the steam, and an unsealed seam will empty itself into the water.
- Which brown sugarVictorian "brown sugar" generally meant a moist, sticky unrefined sugar, closer to today's light muscovado or demerara than to modern soft brown. Muscovado gives a more treacly result; about 4-5 oz suits this quantity of crust.
- "The usual way" means boiled or steamedWrap the roll loosely in floured, buttered greaseproof paper or a scalded and floured cloth, allowing room to swell, tie both ends, and either steam it or lower it into fast-boiling water. Reckon 1 1/2 to 2 hours for this size, keeping the water topped up so it never stops boiling.
- The sauceThe alternative finish is a simple sweet butter sauce: melt about 2 oz butter, stir in 2 oz sugar until dissolved, and sharpen with a teaspoon or two of lemon juice or a good white wine vinegar. The acid is not optional in spirit -- without it the whole plate is one flat note of sugar.
- YieldA pudding made from 8 oz of flour serves four to six, cut in thick diagonal slices. It is best eaten straight from the cloth; the sugar filling sets hard as it cools.
Roly-poly belongs to the great family of British boiled suet puddings that dominated cheap cooking from the early nineteenth century onward, cooked in a pudding cloth -- a technique already long established -- in a pot already on the fire. Jam roly-poly is the version that survived into living memory, but jam was a bought luxury for much of the century, while sugar -- after the duties on it were cut in the 1840s and abolished in 1874 -- was cheap and always in the house. That may well be part of why a book like Cassell's lists a sugar version as a matter of course: it is the same pudding for a household with no preserves in the cupboard. The suggested sauce of melted butter, sugar and vinegar or lemon is often said to be a very old English idea, the same sweet-sharp pairing traditionally associated with the vinegar and butter sauces served with plain puddings.