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Apple Roly Polies
6 baked apples, skin partly removed Pie crust or crust for meat pies Lemon or nutmeg sauce Roll the pie crust one-eighth inch thick; if using crust for meat pies, one-fourth inch thick. Cut in eight-inch squares, put an apple on each, fold the crust, dust with granulated sugar and a little cinnamon, place in a pan oiled with Mazola, and bake thirty minutes. Serve hot with sauce.
A late apple dumpling in all but name, from a promotional book for corn oil. The original assumes you already have baked apples on hand and never names an oven temperature, so both need filling in.
- The apples come pre-bakedThe recipe starts from apples already baked and partly peeled, not raw fruit. Core and partly skin six firm baking apples, bake them until just tender but still holding shape, and cool them before wrapping; raw apples will not soften in thirty minutes inside pastry.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 400F, which should set short pastry quickly and brown it in the half hour specified; at 350F the crust may still be pale at thirty minutes.
- MazolaMazola was and is corn oil, the product this book was written to sell. Any neutral oil works for greasing the pan; the choice has no effect on the pastry.
- Two crust thicknessesAn eighth of an inch for sweet pie pastry, a quarter inch for the sturdier "crust for meat pies," which the recipe does not define but which would have been a plainer savoury paste. The thicker dough is more forgiving to fold around a soft apple.
- Eight-inch squaresThat is a generous wrapper for an average apple. Bring the four corners up over the top, pinch the seams firmly, and set the parcels seam-side up with space between them so the sides brown rather than steam.
- The sauceLemon or nutmeg sauce here most likely means a thin cooked pudding sauce — sugar, water or milk, a little cornstarch or butter, flavoured — rather than a hard sauce. Have it warm and pour it at the table; the pastry softens fast once sauced.
- YieldSix dumplings, one per person, as a hot pudding after a main course. Six eight-inch squares take considerably more pastry than a double-crust pie.
This is a Mazola-era rewriting of a very old idea: fruit baked inside a paste, which English cooks knew as an apple dumpling and, when the dough was rolled and filled rather than wrapped, as a roly-poly. The name has drifted here — a true roly-poly is a rolled and spiralled suet pudding, usually jam-filled and boiled or steamed in a cloth, while these are dumplings folded from squares of pastry and baked. Books like this one were published by American corn-products manufacturers in the first decades of the twentieth century to persuade cooks that refined corn oil could stand in for butter and lard in ordinary baking, which is why a brand name appears in the middle of a set of instructions and why the recipe offers a choice between a sweet crust and the plainer "crust for meat pies" a household would already have on hand. The instruction to leave the skin only partly removed may well be practical rather than decorative: a band of skin would plausibly help a baked apple keep its shape long enough to be wrapped.