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English Roly-Poly
1 cup beef suet (finely chopped) 3 cups Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon sugar Pinch of salt.
Mix salt into the dough, and roll out ½ inch thick. Spread black currant preserves on the dough, roll up, tie in a cloth and boil 1½ hours. Be sure to have the water boiling before putting the pudding in. Serve with sweet sauce.
A suet crust rolled around jam and boiled in a cloth — straightforward once you account for what the original leaves unsaid. Two things are missing from the text: the liquid that turns the dry mixture into dough, and any leavening.
- The dough needs waterThe ingredient list stops at flour, suet, sugar and salt, but a suet crust will not come together without cold water — roughly ¾ to 1¼ cups, added a little at a time until the dough is soft but not sticky. Handle it lightly; suet pastry toughens with working.
- LeaveningThe recipe includes none. Many suet crusts use self-raising flour or baking powder, commonly 2-3 teaspoons per 3 cups of plain flour; without it you will get a dense, close crust rather than a light one. If your flour is plain, add the baking powder.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys. Fresh suet is easiest to chop when very cold, almost frozen, and should be worked into the flour in shreds rather than rubbed smooth like butter. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetarian, substitutes cup for cup.
- Black currant preservesBlack currant jam is still made in Britain and Europe and sold in most well-stocked groceries; blackcurrant bushes were long restricted in parts of the United States because they host white pine blister rust. Any thick, tart jam works — damson, raspberry or plum. Leave a clear inch of bare dough at each end so the jam does not boil out.
- The clothScald the pudding cloth, wring it out, and flour the damp surface generously — this forms the skin that keeps water out. Roll the pudding loosely and tie the ends with string, leaving room for the crust to swell by about a third.
- BoilingThe instruction to have the water at a full boil before the pudding goes in matters: a slow start makes the crust sodden. Keep it at a steady boil for the full 1½ hours and top up with boiling water, never cold, so the pot never goes off the boil.
- Steaming insteadA cloth-boiled roly-poly can be replaced by wrapping the roll in parchment and then foil, pleated to allow expansion, and steaming it over simmering water for the same 1½ hours. The result is drier and less likely to leak.
- Sweet sauceUsually a simple pourable sauce — a sugar-and-butter sauce thinned with boiling water and flavoured with vanilla or lemon, or a thin custard. Serve hot; the crust stiffens quickly as it cools.
- YieldThree cups of flour makes a roll that serves six to eight, cut into thick slices across the spiral.
The jam roly-poly is a Victorian British nursery and schoolroom pudding, one of a family of boiled suet rolls that also produced the bacon roly-poly and the spotted dick; its unofficial names — "dead man's arm," "shirt-sleeve pudding" — are usually traced, in a derivation more folk tradition than documented etymology, to the practice of boiling it in a length of cloth or an old sleeve. Boiling in a floured cloth, rather than baking, suited kitchens where the fire was always going but the oven was not, and it survived in Canadian and American cookbooks well into the twentieth century as an economical dessert built on suet, the cheapest solid fat in the butcher's shop. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to promote its flour, and its recipes were largely gathered from the housewives who used it — which explains the compressed, assume-you-know-it style here, including the omission of the water that any cook of the day would have added without being told.