Raisin Roll
1 cup raisins. 1 cup English walnuts. 1/2 cup sherry. 2 tablespoons butter. Roll pastry thin, spread with raisins, nuts, sugar and butter. Bake brown in moderate oven. Delicious.
A skeleton of a recipe even by 1920 standards: it names five ingredients, omits the pastry quantity and the sugar measure entirely, and never tells you what to do with the sherry. Here is what the gaps require.
- The sherry is a soak, not a fillingThe sherry is unaccounted for -- Nothing in the method tells you what to do with it, and half a cup of liquid poured onto rolled pastry will ruin it. The likeliest reading is that it was meant as a soak: warm the raisins in the sherry until they plump and the liquid is nearly gone, then cool them before they go anywhere near the dough.
- Pastry quantityUnstated. A single-crust plain pastry, about 1 1/2 to 2 cups flour, rolled to a rectangle roughly 10 by 14 inches and about 1/8 inch thick, holds this filling. Roll it up from the long side like a jelly roll, seal the seam, and set it seam down.
- Sugar is unmeasuredThe recipe lists it in the method but gives no quantity. Given a cup of raisins already sweet with sherry, 1/4 to 1/3 cup is enough; more makes the filling run out at the ends.
- Moderate ovenConventionally around 350-375F. Reckon on roughly 35 to 40 minutes, until the pastry is properly browned rather than merely set -- an underbaked bottom is the usual failure with a filled roll.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinct from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Chop them coarsely; whole halves tear the pastry as you roll.
- ButterTwo tablespoons, softened and dotted or spread over the rolled pastry before the filling goes on. Cold butter in lumps will punch through thin dough.
- Catching the leaksSlash the top in three or four places and bake on a parchment-lined sheet with a rim. Sugar and sherry syrup escaping from the ends will scorch on a bare oven floor.
- Yield and servingUnstated; a roll of this size gives roughly eight to ten slices. It is better warm than cold, since the pastry stiffens and the filling sets solid as it cools.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book appeared in 1920, the year national Prohibition took effect in the United States, which makes the casual half cup of sherry here worth noticing — cooking wine occupied an awkward legal and moral space in American cookbooks of the early twenties. Mary A. Wilson wrote from Philadelphia as a newspaper household editor, and her recipes carry the compression of column work: ingredients listed as a bare line, method reduced to a sentence, the assumption that the reader already knows how to roll pastry. The dish itself belongs to a large and loosely defined family of rolled sweet pastries — strudels, roly-polys, jam rolls — that let a household turn dried fruit and nuts into a dessert without fresh fruit or a mould. Raisins and walnuts were both pantry staples that kept through winter, which is why combinations like this one recur across American cookbooks of the period.