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Treacle Pudding, Rolled
INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of suet crust, 1/4 lb. of treacle, 1/2 teaspoonful of grated ginger.
Make, with 1 lb. of flour, a suet crust by our given recipe, roll it out to the thickness of 1/2 inch, and spread the treacle equally over it, leaving a small margin where the paste joins; roll it up, close the ends securely, tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil for 2 hours. This pudding is economical, and a favourite one with children; but it is, of course, only suitable for a nursery, or very plain family dinner. Made with a lard instead of a suet crust, it would be very nice baked, and would be sufficiently done in from 1 to 2 hours.
TIME. Boiled pudding, 2 hours; baked pudding, 1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A rolled suet pudding of the plainest sort, and one of the few in the book where the method matters more than the ingredient list. Two points need settling before you start: what treacle means, and how tightly the cloth is tied.
- The quantity is self-contradictoryThe quantities do not quite agree -- the list calls for 1 lb of suet crust, while the method says to make the crust with 1 lb of flour, which yields rather more than 1 lb. Take the flour figure as the working one: 1 lb flour with 6-8 oz shredded suet, a pinch of salt and enough cold water to bind, giving something on the order of 1 lb 12 oz of crust. Halve everything for four people.
- TreacleIn a British book of this date treacle means black treacle, dark and slightly bitter, close to but not identical with American molasses. Golden syrup, which had become widely available by the late nineteenth century, is what most modern treacle puddings actually use and gives the familiar sweet, mild result. 1/4 lb is about 1/3 cup.
- SuetBeef suet, shredded. Packaged shredded suet (beef or vegetarian) works straight from the box; a block of raw kidney suet should be grated on the coarse side while very cold. Butter frozen and grated will do but produces a shorter, less spongy crust.
- The margin is the hingeLeaving treacle off the edges and sealing the ends firmly is the whole trick. Syrup that reaches a seam will find its way out during two hours of boiling, and a leaking roly-poly turns into a slack tube of wet paste.
- The clothScald the cloth, wring it out, flour the inside generously, and wrap the roll loosely along its length with a tuck of slack so the crust can swell. Tie the ends like a cracker. A modern equivalent is a double layer of pleated parchment and foil, tied at both ends, which is easier to handle.
- BoilingThe water must be at a rolling boil when the pudding goes in and must not stop boiling; topping up should be done with boiling water from a kettle. A dropped temperature gives a heavy, greyish crust.
- The baked versionThe book gives no oven temperature. A moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F, suits the lard-crust variant, on a tray to catch any escaping syrup. Beeton allows 1 to 2 hours.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity should feed about six to eight. Serve hot in thick slices with custard or plain cream; it stiffens considerably as it cools.
Rolled puddings boiled in a floured cloth are among the older surviving forms of the English pudding -- the cloth predates the basin, and both predate the oven-baked sponge -- and they persisted longest in exactly the settings Mrs Beeton names: the nursery and the plain family dinner. The dismissive note is worth reading closely: treacle was cheap, suet was a by-product of the butcher's block, and a pudding built from flour, fat and syrup could fill a table for pennies, which is precisely why it carried no prestige at a formal one. Black treacle was a residue of sugar refining and had long been a sweetener of poorer households; golden syrup, a lighter refinery product marketed from the 1880s, gradually displaced it in this dish and produced the sweeter treacle sponge better known today. The name "roly-poly" for the rolled version is recorded in the nineteenth century, and the jam-filled variant is the same construction with a different filling.