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Cherry Roly Poly
Remove the fiber and skin from five ounces of suet and chop it very fine; add half a pound of flour and one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt; mix well. Add sufficient cold water to make it stick together, and roll out on a well-floured board to the thickness of an inch. Cover well with pitted cherries, dust with sugar and roll quickly; tie in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for it to swell. Place in a kettle of boiling water and keep it boiling steadily for two hours, or it may be steamed for two hours and a half. Serve hot with any nice sweet sauce, or with sweetened cream.
A boiled suet pastry rolled around fruit — the pudding cloth is the whole technique, and everything depends on the water never going off the boil.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingIf the pot drops to a simmer or the cloth is lifted clear of the water, the suet crust turns dense and sodden. Keep the roll fully submerged in hard-boiling water and top up from a kettle of boiling water, never cold.
- WeightsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; five ounces of chopped suet is a generous cup, loosely packed. That is a rich crust — the more usual ratio is half fat to flour — so expect something closer to a dumpling than a pie pastry.
- SuetBeef kidney suet from a butcher, with membrane pulled away and the fat chopped or grated cold, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet (including vegetarian versions) works and skips the trimming; frozen grated butter is the usual stand-in but gives a softer, less airy crust.
- An inch is too thickAn inch is unusually thick -- Most roly poly recipes call for a quarter to a half inch of crust, and a full inch risks the centre staying underdone. Rolling it thinner into a rectangle keeps the two-hour boil ample.
- The clothScald a square of unbleached cotton or a tea towel, wring it out, and flour the inside heavily so the flour and water form a seal. Tie both ends and the seam loosely, leaving an inch or two of slack — the roll swells noticeably. A tight parcel splits.
- Cherries and sugarNo sugar quantity is given. Allow roughly a third of a cup for a pound of sour cherries, less for sweet; drain them well, since free juice will soak the crust and leak through the cloth.
- Steaming insteadFor the steamed version, wrap in pleated parchment then foil, or use a covered basin, and give it two and a half hours over water kept at a steady boil.
- Yield and sauceServes about four to six. "Any nice sweet sauce" of the period would typically be a hard sauce, a thin custard, or a warmed cherry syrup; cream with a little sugar is the plainest and best.
Roly poly belongs to the English school of boiled suet puddings that dominated British and American hot-dessert cookery through the nineteenth century, when a pot of water on the range was easier to control than an oven. Jam roly poly is the familiar version; cherry, apple and currant fillings were equally common, and the pudding cloth — floured so the surface flour gels into a skin — was standard equipment in any kitchen that also boiled its Christmas pudding. As home ovens grew reliable and beef suet moved from the larder to a butcher's special order, boiled puddings dropped out of the American repertoire and survived mainly in Britain.