Home › Hot Desserts › Roly-Poly Pudding
Roly-Poly Pudding
Short paste Jam Take any quantity of paste, according to the size of the pudding required, and roll it out half an inch thick. Spread the jam over the paste, leaving a margin of an inch all around. Now dampen the margin slightly, and fold the paste very lightly, but press the edges together. Wrap the pudding loosely in a buttered paper, and steam for four hours. Sweet white sauce can be served with it if liked. The pudding can be made with golden syrup instead of jam. Small berries are also good.
A plain English steamed roll that depends almost entirely on how you seal it and how long you steam it. The original four hours belongs to a suet paste cooked in a cloth over an open fire; a modern butter or vegetable-shortening paste in a covered steamer needs far less.
- "Short paste"A shortcrust of the older kind, made with something like half as much fat as flour and mixed to a firm, rollable dough with cold water, rather than the crumbly tart paste we now mean by shortcrust. The recipe does not specify the fat; butter or a vegetable shortening will serve where the beef suet of the standard Victorian roly-poly is not wanted.
- Steaming timeFour hours will not ruin the pudding, but it is generous. A roll made from about 8 oz of flour, roughly 10 inches long, will usually be cooked through in 1 1/2 to 2 hours of steady steaming; check the paste is firm and dry rather than tacky.
- WrappingButtered paper means greased kitchen paper, and it was the wrapping, not the vessel. Use buttered parchment with a pleat down the middle to allow expansion, then a loose outer layer of foil, and set the roll on a rack or an upturned saucer above simmering water in a covered pan. Keep the water topped up with boiling water for the whole steaming.
- "Fold the paste very lightly"Keep it slack rather than tight, so the paste has room to swell, and pinch the dampened margin and the ends firmly closed. A leaking seam or end is the commonest way this pudding goes wrong.
- Golden syrup versionSyrup runs where jam sits still. Toss it with two or three tablespoons of fresh breadcrumbs before spreading, or it will find the seam and boil out into the steamer.
- Small berriesFresh berries release a lot of juice. Sprinkle a spoonful of sugar and a teaspoon of cornflour over them so the filling thickens rather than flooding the paste.
- Sweet white sauceTypically milk thickened with a little cornflour or with flour and butter, sweetened and flavoured with vanilla or lemon, and served thin enough to pour. Custard is the usual modern substitute.
- YieldThe recipe sets no quantity. Taking 8 oz of flour as a working size, the roll serves four to six, cut into thick slices across the roll and served hot with the sauce.
The roly-poly is one of the great cheap puddings of nineteenth-century English kitchens: flour, fat, water and a spoonful of preserve, cooked by steam over the fire while the rest of the meal was got ready. Traditionally it was made with beef suet and boiled in a floured cloth, and generations of schoolchildren are said to have known it as dead man's arm or dead man's leg, supposedly from its shape when it emerged. Golden syrup, a by-product of cane refining sold in tins from the mid-1880s onwards, had by then become a standard British pudding sweetener.