Roley Poley
or Rolled Jam Pudding.-Roll out some puff paste (No. 4) about a quarter of an inch thick, spread it with jam, roll it up, tie it loosely in a cloth, and boil it.
ROMAN COOKERY is a warning. The ridicule which it now excites is a tribute to the more simple taste and delicate manipulation of modern times. Mines of wealth were spent upon it; infinite pains were wasted upon it; the uttermost parts of the earth were ransacked; five hundred peacocks were killed, to make with their brains a single dish and to what result? Any Picardy kitchenmaid will turn out a better dinner for a few francs. Rook All may be summed up in the convivial song of Captain Morris :- Old Lucullus, they say, Forty cooks had each day, And Vitellius's meals cost a million; But I like what is good, When or where be my food, In a chophouse or royal pavilion.
At all feasts (if enough) I most heartily stuff, And a song at my heart alike rushes, Though I've not fed my lungs Upon nightingales' tongues, Nor the brains of goldfinches and thrushes. 66 were Rook." If this useful bird," says Waterton, not so closely allied to the carrion-crow in colour and in shape, we should see it sent up to the tables of the rich as often as we see the pigeon. But prejudice forbids the appearance of broiled rook in the lordly mansion. If we wish to partake of it, we must repair to the cottage of the lowly swain, or here and there to the hall of the homely country squire, whose kitchen has never been blessed by the presence of a first-rate cook, and whose yearnings for a good and wholesome dish are not stifled by the fear of what a too highly polished world will say."
For rook pie, take fillets and thighbones of the young bird, and proceed as for pigeon pie; but they take long baking-perhaps an hour and a half-and may as well be stewed a little first.
Roux means russet. It is flour and butter fried together to a russet hue. Then there is white roux-that is, white russet a fine contradiction of terms.
It is flour and butter cooked together, but not allowed to brown.
Two lines of instruction and no times, quantities or temperatures — typical of Kettner's, which assumes a cook who already knows what a boiled pudding is. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: seal the endsSpread the jam to within about an inch of the edges, then dampen that margin and pinch it closed as you finish rolling. Jam that escapes into the cloth turns the water sugary and leaves you with a hollow pudding.
- "Tie it loosely"This is the other instruction that matters. The crust swells considerably as it cooks, and a tightly bound cloth gives a dense, cracked pudding. Leave a good couple of inches of slack and tie the ends like a cracker.
- Preparing the clothA pudding cloth needs to be scalded in boiling water, wrung out, and floured on the inside face before the roll goes in. Dry unfloured cloth sticks to the paste and tears it when unwrapped. Modern practice is greaseproof paper inside a loose foil parcel, pleated down the middle for expansion.
- Paste No. 4The cross-reference is to Kettner's own puff paste entry. Puff paste boiled in a cloth does not puff; it goes soft and slightly slippery. The version that became standard is a suet crust — roughly 8 oz flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a teaspoon of baking powder and cold water to bind — which holds its shape in the water and stays light.
- TimeNone is given. A roll made from about 8 oz of flour needs 1½ to 2 hours at a steady simmer, either fully submerged or in a steamer. Keep a kettle going and top the pan up with boiling water; if the level drops, the exposed end cooks unevenly.
- Yield and servingThat size cuts into six thick slices. Unwrap it on a warm dish rather than a cold one, and serve at once with custard or cream — the crust firms up quickly as it cools.
- On the rook pie noteThe rook paragraph is mostly quoted commentary from Waterton, though it ends with brief working instructions: fillets and thighbones of the young bird, treated as for pigeon pie, baked perhaps an hour and a half and stewed a little first. Note that all wild birds are protected under UK law, and rooks may be taken only within the terms of a general licence. Read the passage as period commentary rather than as something to act on.
A roly-poly is simply a sheet of paste rolled around a filling and boiled, and it belongs to the great family of English cloth-boiled puddings that ran from the seventeenth century well into the twentieth — food built around a pot of water rather than an oven, which most cottage kitchens did not have. The jam version depends on cheap sugar, so it is essentially a nineteenth-century dish; earlier rolled puddings leaned on suet, currants and treacle. Schoolroom and barracks nicknames — "dead man's arm" or "dead man's leg", from the practice of boiling the roll in a shirt sleeve when no pudding cloth was handy — are traditional rather than documented. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written by the journalist E. S. Dallas under the name of the London restaurateur Auguste Kettner, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary, which is why a nursery pudding sits here between a diatribe against Roman cookery and a definition of roux.