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Roly-Poly
3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup suet ½ teaspoon salt Sweet milk to mix Raspberry jam.
Mix with sweet milk and roll out. a Spread with raspberry jam, roll in cloth and steam 3 hours. Serve with sauce or cream and sugar.
A suet pastry rolled around jam and steamed in a cloth — the plainest of the boiled puddings, and the one most dependent on how tightly you tie the parcel. Everything else here is forgiving.
- The hinge: tie the cloth loose but seal itThe dough must have room to swell, so the cloth is rolled around it with slack and the ends tied off like a cracker, not cinched to the pastry. But the seams and ends must be closed, or water gets in and the whole thing turns to paste. Flour the inside of the cloth generously first; that flour sets into a skin that keeps the surface intact.
- Suet, and what to use insteadA cup of suet means beef kidney fat, chopped or shredded fine — roughly 4 oz by weight. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works directly. Frozen butter grated on the coarse side of a box grater is a common substitute, though it gives a shorter, less springy crust.
- "Sweet milk to mix"Sweet milk simply means fresh milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk called for elsewhere in this book. Expect about 1 to 1¼ cups to bring 3 cups of flour to a soft, rollable dough — add it gradually, since the amount depends on your flour.
- Rolling and spreadingRoll to a rectangle a scant ½ inch thick. Leave a clear border of an inch on all sides when you spread the jam, then dampen that border and press it shut after rolling, or the jam boils out into the cloth.
- Three hours is longer than it needsA pudding this size is generally cooked through in about 2 hours of steady steaming. The extra hour does no harm but tends to produce a heavier, wetter crust.
- Steaming without a clothA greased 6-cup pudding basin, covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied, will also work, though timing may differ from the cloth roll. Or steam the roll on parchment in a covered roasting pan of simmering water. Keep the water topped up with boiling water throughout, and never let it go off the boil.
- Yield and servingServes 6 to 8, cut into thick rounds. "Sauce" here would mean a sweet pudding sauce — hard sauce, a thin custard, or a lemon or vanilla cornstarch sauce are the usual candidates; cream and sugar is the plainer option given.
Roly-poly belongs to the British tradition of suet puddings boiled in a floured cloth, a method that predates the domestic oven and let a household cook a pudding in the same pot as the dinner. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from 1913 onward and built out of recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, carries a whole section of these boiled puddings. Suet was the fat at hand in any house that bought beef by the quarter, and jam was the winter's preserving put to use. The name is generally taken as nursery reduplication describing the shape — the pudding is rolled, and it rolls — and the jam version appears in English cookery books from around the middle of the nineteenth century, sometimes under the schoolroom nickname "dead man's arm" (or "dead man's leg") for the way it emerges from its cloth.