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Flour Mixtures: Quick Breads: Milk
BLACKBERRY ROLY POLY 1 pint of blackberries 1/2 teaspoonful (scant) of salt 1/4 cup of water 1/4 cup of shortening 3/4 cup of sugar Yolk of 1 egg 1 1/2 cups of pastry flour Milk or water 3 level teaspoonfuls of baking White of 1 egg, beaten slightly powder Granulated sugar Cook the berries with the water in a covered saucepan until softened and stain through a sieve fine enough to keep back the seeds; add the sugar and let cook until quite thick, stirring occasionally. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt, work in the shortening and mix to a dough with the yolk of egg and a little milk or water. Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead, to get it in shape, then roll out into a rectangular sheet one-fourth an inch thick; cut this into four pieces longer than wide. Spread each piece with the blackberry mixture, roll up like a jelly roll and set into a baking pan. Brush the top of each roll with white of egg, then dredge with sugar. Bake about twenty-five minutes. Serve hot with the rest of the blackberry, kept hot in boiling water, as a sauce.
A baked, biscuit-dough version of the British jam roly-poly, printed here with the ingredient list scrambled into two columns — read it as flour, baking powder, salt, shortening, egg yolk, milk, sugar, and berries. No oven temperature is given, which is the main gap.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range and gives no figure. Twenty-five minutes for a rich biscuit dough suggests a hot oven; around 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading. The rolls should be browned and firm and the egg-white glaze set.
- A pint of blackberriesA dry pint is about 12 oz, roughly 2 1/2 cups of berries. Frozen berries work and need no extra water, since they release their own as they thaw.
- Strain, not stainThe typo is in the original. The berries are pressed through a sieve to leave the seeds behind, then the pulp is cooked down with the sugar to a thick jam consistency — thin filling will run out of the rolls and burn on the pan.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than modern all-purpose. Approximate it by replacing about a tablespoon of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or simply use all-purpose and knead as little as the recipe says.
- ShorteningAt this date this meant lard, butter, or a lard-and-butter mixture; hydrogenated vegetable shortening was not yet on the market. Cold butter cut in gives the best flavour and flake.
- Baking powderThree level teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is heavy by current standards; today's powders are more reliable and 2 teaspoons is ample. The older amount can leave a faint metallic taste.
- Splitting the fillingPart of the cooked blackberry goes inside the rolls and the remainder is held back as sauce; the recipe does not say in what proportion. Keeping it hot over boiling water rather than on direct heat stops it scorching and thickening further while the rolls bake.
- YieldFour rolls, from the four pieces the dough is cut into. Best eaten warm, as the dough stiffens once cool.
The roly-poly is an English pudding: a sheet of suet dough spread with jam, rolled, wrapped in a floured cloth and boiled or steamed for a couple of hours, a nursery and school-dinner staple through the nineteenth century. What appears here is the American translation of it — suet replaced by shortening, the cloth and the steam kettle replaced by chemical baking powder and a hot oven, and the whole thing done in under an hour. That shift may well be why the recipe sits in a chapter on quick breads rather than among the puddings, baking powder having by then remade a whole class of dishes that had previously required long steaming or a yeast sponge. Blackberries were an obvious filling, and the recipe calls for the seeds to be sieved out.