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Apple Roly-Poly
One pint of flour; one teaspoon of baking powder; one teaspoon of salt; milk; one tablespoon of lard or butter; one teacup of sugar; two teaspoons of cinnamon; apples. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt well together, rub the lard into them, and when all is thoroughly mixed, add sufficient sweet milk to make a soft dough. Turn the dough out upon the moldingboard, mold it smooth, sifting flour under it to prevent its sticking to the board, and roll it into a sheet one-fourth of an inch thick. Spread this thickly with sliced apples, and sift over them the sugar and cinnamon. Roll the dough up the same as jelly cake, press the overlapping parts of dough well to the body of the pudding and also press the ends well to prevent the escape of the juices. Place the pudding on a plate, set the plate in a steamer over a kettle of hot water, and steam one and one-half hours.
A steamed biscuit-dough pudding of the plainest sort. The measurements are volumetric and a little loose, and the success of the thing rests almost entirely on sealing the roll.
- A pint of flourTwo cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose flour. The softer, lower-protein flours common in the period would likely have absorbed somewhat less liquid than modern all-purpose, so the dough may come together with a little less milk than you expect.
- One teacup of sugarA teacup in this period runs smaller than a modern measuring cup — reckon about 3/4 cup. With two teaspoons of cinnamon that is a heavily spiced, sweet filling; scale the cinnamon back to one teaspoon if you want the apples to read as apples.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the era called for. Start with about 3/4 cup and add by the spoonful to reach a soft, barely tacky dough.
- Lard or butterOne tablespoon into two cups of flour is a very lean shortcrust — this is a dumpling dough, not pastry. Two to three tablespoons gives a more tender crust without changing the method.
- Seal the endsThe hinge of the recipe. Apple juice released during a ninety-minute steam will find any gap, and a leaking roly-poly steams into a soggy sheet. Pinch the long seam firmly, roll it underneath, and crimp both ends closed.
- Slice the apples thinA firm cooking apple cut no thicker than 1/8 inch. Thick slices will still be crisp when the dough is done, and the raw wedges push the crust apart as they shrink.
- The steamerAny covered pot with a rack that holds a greased heatproof plate clear of the water. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water as needed — a dry kettle will scorch before the pudding is done.
- Doneness and yieldAfter 1 1/2 hours the crust should be dry and springy to the touch and a skewer should meet no resistance in the apple. The recipe gives no yield; a pint of flour makes a roll of roughly four to six thick slices.
- ServingThe recipe treats this as a pudding, and it is plain on its own. A hard sauce, a lemon sauce or plain cream is a natural accompaniment, though the recipe specifies none.
The roly-poly is an English boiled pudding — a sheet of dough spread with jam, mincemeat or fruit, rolled up and cooked in a cloth over water — and it reached American cookbooks along with the rest of the steamed-pudding repertoire. The older British versions used a suet crust and were boiled in a floured pudding cloth; here the suet has become a spoonful of lard and the leavening a teaspoon of baking powder. Chemical leavening was widely available by the time such household books were being published, and it let a cook produce something close to a suet crust without the suet or the cloth. Apple is often said to have been a common filling in American kitchens for the same reason it was a common pie: fruit that kept in a cellar all winter and cost nothing in the fall.</p>