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Boiled Cranberry Roll
2 quarts of cranberries. 1 pound of white sugar. 1/2 pint of water. Wash and pick over the cranberries, place them in a bright kettle, strew the sugar over the top and pour the water over that. Put on a tight lid to keep in the steam, let them come to a boil slowly. Cook about half an hour. Mash through a colander and use the pulp for the boiled rolls. It ought to be cold before being used.
All of these puddings are calculated for about fifty people's orders. Hotel cooks dishing up dinner like to sell out their wares, whether fish, entrees, pastries or creams, as well as people in market. The market varies a little in its demands, but in a general way the roly-poly puddings finding the readiest sale are the two kinds proceeding; after them come CURRANT JELLY ROLL. APRICOT JAM ROLL. PEACH ROLL. HUCKLEBERRY ROLL. and then one made with molasses mixed with flour and vinegar. It takes baking-powder to make the preceding articles, but the less shortening. Light and wholesome preparations are taking the places of the too solid puddings of a little while back. But baking-powder cannot be had everywhere, and the cook is most independent of circumstances who is richest in resources. Other kinds of paste will do well, as will be shown further on. At present we are in haste to get up some puddings for Sundays. Before getting too far away from them, however, it is necessary to remark that none of the plum puddings intended for boiling are of much account when baked, but the following, if carefully baked, will be found very satisfactory. To crumble bread when it cannot be grated, first slice it very thin, then cut in shreds and across in small squares. It is the only neat way. Puddings with white rough pieces of bread in the middle do not look well.
What is given here is really the filling — a stiff cranberry pulp — plus the author's notes on how a hotel pastry cook worked through the day's puddings. The paste and the boiling are assumed knowledge, so a few gaps need filling.
- The quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of cranberries is about 2 pounds, which is nearer three of the standard 12-ounce bags than two. Half a pint of water is one cup, and a pound of white sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups.
- A "bright kettle"This means a clean, unstained pan with a sound tinned or enamelled surface. Cranberries are strongly acidic and will pick up a metallic taste and grey cast from bare cast iron or scratched aluminium. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron is the modern equivalent.
- Thirty minutes is longCranberries burst within about ten minutes of coming to a simmer and are fully broken down in fifteen. The half hour here is aimed at a thick, jam-stiff pulp that will not run out of a roll; watch it after fifteen minutes and stop when a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track.
- The instruction that matters"It ought to be cold before being used." Warm fruit pulp soaks into the paste and makes the roll more likely to split along the seam in the water. Chill it thoroughly, ideally overnight, until it is spreadable but holds its shape.
- SievingMashing through a colander gives a pulp with the skins largely held back. A coarse sieve or a food mill on the medium plate does the same job faster. A blender is the wrong tool — it purées the skins back in and thins the set.
- The paste that goes with itNo paste is given. The passage implies something in the roly-poly tradition raised with baking powder, and the author notes that it takes baking-powder but the less shortening. Such a paste is rolled out, spread with the cold filling, rolled up, wrapped loosely in a floured cloth or parchment and foil, and boiled or steamed.
- YieldThe author states that "All of these puddings are calculated for about fifty people's orders," i.e. this quantity is sized for roughly fifty hotel portions. How many rolls it fills is not stated.
- The bread note at the endThe remark about slicing bread thin, then into shreds, then into squares belongs to the baked puddings he turns to next, not to the cranberry roll. Dried bread in a food processor now does the same work, pulsed rather than run.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for men running hotel and restaurant kitchens in late nineteenth-century America, and this entry shows it: a recipe and a market report in the same breath, with an eye on which puddings sell out fastest at the dinner service. The roly-poly itself is English, a suet paste spread with jam and boiled in a cloth, and it crossed to American hotel menus intact — among the fillings Whitehead lists is the cranberry, from the Massachusetts and New Jersey bogs, which by the 1880s were a substantial commercial crop shipped and sold by the barrel. His aside about baking powder is the interesting part historically: chemical leavening was still new enough that a cook could not count on finding it in every kitchen he worked in, and Whitehead's advice — be rich in resources, know several kinds of paste — is the advice of a man who expected his readers to move from house to house.