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Roly-Poly Pudding
Remove sinews from five ounces fresh beef suet and chop very finely, place in mortar with an once butter and thoroughly pound. Sift an ounce flour on corner of a table, make a small fountain in centre, pour in it two gills water, half teaspoon vanilla essence, then the pounded suet. Knead the whole well together, then roll out batter on the floured corner of table to quarter-inch thickness. Spread over it evenly half pound any kind marmalade. Roll up, then wrap in a cloth. Tie it all around, plunge in boiling water and boil two hours. Remove, unwrap, place on a dish and serve with a Sabayon sauce.
A boiled suet pastry rolled around jam, one of the plainest English puddings, here written up in the clipped hotel-kitchen shorthand of the period. The quantities as printed will not work without adjustment.
- The flour is wrongOne ounce of flour cannot absorb two gills of water, let alone five ounces of suet and an ounce of butter. Suet pastry runs about twice the weight of flour to fat, so somewhere between 10 and 12 ounces of flour is what the rest of the recipe implies. Treat the printed figure as a compositor's error and add flour until you have a soft, rollable dough.
- A gill4 fl oz, half a cup, in American usage; 5 fl oz in British, so two gills is a cup or a little more. With a proper quantity of flour you will still likely need less than that; add the water gradually and stop when the dough just holds together.
- SuetFresh beef suet from a butcher is the raw kidney fat, sold in lumps with membrane and sinew running through it, which is what the recipe means by removing sinews. Shredded packaged suet needs no pounding. If you use the block kind, grate it frozen rather than working it in a mortar; a food processor pulsed briefly does the same job as the mortar and butter.
- Keep the fat coldThe pounding is meant to blend suet and butter, not warm them. Chilled fat left in visible flecks is what makes the finished crust light instead of dense.
- Wrapping and boilingFlour the cloth well before rolling the pudding in it, and leave slack at each end: the dough swells. Tie it loosely, drop into water already at a full boil, and keep the water above the pudding for the whole two hours, topping up from a kettle so the boil never drops.
- MarmaladeHalf a pound is generous for this size of pudding and may leak at the ends. Leave a clear inch of dough at each end and press it shut before rolling.
- Sabayon sauceThe Italian zabaglione: egg yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as Marsala whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. Make it while the pudding rests, and serve at once, since it collapses as it cools.
- YieldAbout six servings, cut in thick slices.
Roly-poly belongs to the family of boiled suet puddings that carried English cooking through centuries of open-hearth kitchens, when a cloth-wrapped pudding in a pot of water asked far less of a cook than a controlled oven did. The name is simply descriptive of the shape; the older nursery labels for it — dead man's arm, dead man's leg — are traditionally explained by the practice of boiling the pudding in a shirtsleeve when no pudding cloth was to hand, but that is folk explanation rather than documented origin. Jam roly-poly was often made with raspberry or strawberry preserve; the direction here for marmalade, plus vanilla essence in the dough and a sabayon rather than custard to finish it, is characteristic of this book's habit of running an English domestic staple through a French professional kitchen. Suet puddings were still ordinary restaurant fare at the turn of the century, and packaged shredded suet was on sale by then, though a hotel kitchen with a mortar to hand would have gone on trimming and pounding its own.