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Boiled Green Apple Roll
Pare and slice enough good cooking apples to make two quarts when minced. Chop them in a bowl and use without cooking, to spread over the paste. Cut the paste already made into 4 pieces, roll out thin, spread the chopped apples evenly, roll up and tie in pudding cloths previously wetted and floured. Stick a pin in the middle to prevent swelling open; drop into plenty of boiling water and keep boiling without check from an hour to an hour and a half. Serve with butter and sugar hard sauce.
These rolls can be steamed as well. The writer thinks they are better boiled. Dip each one a moment in cold water when taking up, they come out of the cloth easier for it.
A cloth-boiled roly-poly of the kind that was standard hotel and boarding-house sweet work. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens at the cloth stage.
- The paste"The paste already made" refers back to a paste given earlier in the book; for a cloth-boiled roll it would be a suet or short pudding paste rather than puff pastry, which disintegrates in boiling water. A suet crust of roughly 2 parts flour to 1 part shredded suet or frozen grated butter, bound with cold water, is what holds up for an hour in a pot.
- Two quarts of minced appleThat is about 2.5 to 3 lb of apples once pared and cored, roughly 6 to 8 medium fruit. Use a firm cooking apple that holds shape; the filling goes in raw and cooks in the roll. No sugar is added to the filling, which is why the hard sauce is not optional.
- Pudding clothsA square of unbleached calico or a doubled square of muslin, about 18 inches, boiled first to remove dressing, then wetted and dusted with flour so the crust does not stick. A clean cotton tea towel works if it is not terry and has no fabric softener in it.
- The pinThe pin secures the cloth so the roll cannot burst open as the crust swells. A stainless safety pin or a few loose stitches of kitchen twine does the same job and will not fall into the pot. Tie the ends loosely enough to leave the roll room to expand.
- Boiling without checkThis is the hinge. Keep the water at a full rolling boil the whole time and top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, or the crust turns heavy and sodden. The roll should be fully submerged and free to move.
- SteamingIf you steam instead, allow longer than the boiling time, as the heat transfer is slower. The author's preference for boiling is a texture judgment, not a rule.
- The cold-water dipA brief dip contracts the crust away from the cloth so it peels rather than tears. A second or two only, then unwrap immediately while everything is still hot.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with about twice its weight in powdered sugar, flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg or brandy, chilled firm. It melts over the hot roll and supplies the sweetness the raw apple filling lacks.
- YieldFour rolls, each cutting into 3 or 4 thick slices, so 12 to 16 servings. A quarter of the recipe suits a household.
Boiled apple roll belongs to the family of the English roly-poly pudding, a cloth-boiled roll of suet paste that ran on jam, currants, treacle or fruit depending on what was in the house. The cloth, rather than a basin or tin, was the older method and the cheaper one: a pot of water and a length of calico needed no oven, which mattered in kitchens where the range was already fully committed. Puddings of this kind recur in period collections because they scale cleanly and hold in the water until they are wanted. The aside that "the writer thinks they are better boiled" is a personal judgment of the sort such books often carry, and the small trick at the end about the cold-water dip reads as stove-side experience.