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Sweet Potato Roll
Prepare pastry as for cherry roll. Spread it out, and cover it with layers of boiled sweet potatoes, thoroughly mashed. Pour over it melted butter and sugar, highly flavored with lemon. Roll it up, boil in a bag, and serve with butter and sugar sauce.--Mrs. Dr.J.F.G.
A boiled pudding roll of the sort that predates reliable ovens: a rolled crust, a sweet filling, and a long simmer in a floured cloth. The original assumes you have already read the cherry roll recipe and know how to tie a pudding bag, so most of the work of modernising is filling in what was too obvious to write down.
- The hinge: the clothA pudding boiled in a bag will be waterlogged unless the cloth is scalded, wrung out, and dusted generously with flour before the dough goes in. That flour forms a skin the moment it hits the water. Tie the ends with string but leave slack for expansion, and keep the water at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, topping up with boiling water so the pot never goes off the boil.
- "Pastry as for cherry roll"The cross-referenced recipe is not reproduced here, but a roll of this kind wants a soft rolled crust, either a suet paste or a biscuit-type dough made with flour, fat, a little salt and enough liquid to roll -- not a flaky pie pastry, which disintegrates in water. As a starting point, try 2 cups flour to about 1/2 cup suet or shortening and 3/4 cup water or milk. Roll it about 1/4 inch thick.
- QuantitiesNone are given in this receipt. For a crust made from 2 cups of flour, figure roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of mashed sweet potato, 3 to 4 tablespoons melted butter, 1/2 cup sugar, and the grated zest plus juice of one lemon.
- "Highly flavored with lemon"Lemon peel and lemon extract appear freely as flavourings in receipts of this period, and the instruction here is emphatic, so do not be timid with it. Zest carries better through long boiling than juice.
- Keep the filling dryMash the potatoes thoroughly and do not thin them; a wet filling steams inside the crust and splits it. Leave a clear border of dough at each end and pinch the seam and ends firmly closed before it goes in the cloth.
- TimingA roll of this size needs about 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a simmer. Nothing inside is raw meat or egg, so the only question is whether the crust is cooked through -- cut into it at the thickest point rather than trusting a clock.
- Boiling without a bagIf you have no pudding cloth, a double layer of buttered and floured muslin, or parchment inside a wrapping of foil, tied at both ends and simmered on a rack, gives the same result. Turn the roll once halfway through.
- Butter and sugar sauceMost likely a hard sauce: butter creamed with sugar until pale, flavored with lemon or a spoon of spirits, served cold in a dish so it melts against the hot pudding. Melted, lightly heated versions also circulated under the same name, and the receipt does not say which is meant.
- YieldOne roll of this size serves six to eight, cut in thick slices. It is best the hour it comes out of the pot; reheated, the crust turns heavy.
Boiled and steamed rolls appear in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), a compilation of contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and it is tempting to read something in that into the kitchens they came from: a pot over the fire was dependable in a way that a wood-fired oven, needing constant judgment of its heat, was not, though the books themselves give no such reason. Sweet potatoes were the practical Southern winter vegetable, stored in banks or hills through the cold months and used across the whole meal, from side dish to pie to pudding, which is why they turn up here in a form an English cook would have filled with jam or suet and currants. Marion Cabell Tyree, who edited the book, credited receipts to their donors by initials or married name, and "Mrs. Dr. J. F. G." is one of those whose full identity the book never spells out -- a reminder that these collections were social documents as much as culinary ones, circulating among women who already knew whose cherry roll was being referred to.