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Dog in a Blanket
1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful powdered sugar 1 tablespoonful lard 1/2 tablespoonfuls butter Milk 5 tart oranges 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) sugar 1 tablespoonful melted butter 1 pint (2 cups) lemon custard 2 tablespoonfuls chopped walnut meats Sieve the flour, baking powder, salt and powdered sugar into a basin, rub the lard and butter into them and make the mixture into a rather stiff dough with some milk. Roll it into a sheet onehalf inch in thickness. Brush with the melted butter and sprinkle the sugar over it. Then cover it with the oranges, which have been peeled, sliced thin and seeded. Roll up into a compact roll. Tie it in a buttered, floured cloth and boil for two hours. Drain and unwrap on a hot platter. Decorate with the chopped nuts. Serve with a lemon custard made with one cupful of sugar, one tablespoonful of flour, two egg yolks, the grated rinds and strained juice of two lemons, and one and one-half cupfuls of water.
This is a Creole recipe over one hundred years old.
I bundle rhubarb 1½ lemon
A rolled boiled pudding, cooked in a floured cloth rather than a tin. The dough is essentially a rich baking-powder biscuit standing in for the older suet crust, and the whole thing succeeds or fails on how tightly it is wrapped.
- The hinge: wrap loose, tie tightFlour the buttered cloth generously and leave an inch or two of slack along the length of the roll so the dough can swell, but tie the ends firmly and pinch the dough seam shut. A cloth stretched drum-tight gives a dense pudding; a loose tie lets water in and the orange juice out.
- Weights and vesselsHalf a pound of flour is the 2 cups the text gives, but weigh it if you can — 225 g. A "basin" here is simply a mixing bowl. Powdered sugar in this period usually means finely ground granulated rather than modern confectioners' sugar with cornstarch; either works in the dough.
- Boiling, and the modern alternativeThe roll needs to sit in water at a steady simmer for the full two hours, fully submerged, with boiling water topped up as it evaporates. A covered steamer over simmering water does the same job with less risk of the cloth touching the pan bottom and scorching.
- The orangesFive tart oranges sliced thin will shed a great deal of juice. Seed and slice them, then drain the slices for a few minutes before laying them on the dough, and leave a clear half-inch border so the seam can seal. "Tart" may point to sour or Seville-type fruit, but it may equally mean simply a sharp-flavored sweet orange; a mix of orange with a little grapefruit or lemon approximates it.
- FatLard and butter together give the tenderness and the flavor respectively. All butter is acceptable; all shortening is not, and the pudding turns waxy when it cools.
- The lemon custardThe sauce ingredients are given but not the method: whisk the sugar and flour with the water, cook until it thickens, then temper in the beaten yolks and cook gently a minute or two more before adding the lemon juice and rind. Do not let it boil hard after the yolks go in, and add the juice last so the acid does not thin the starch.
- Serving and yieldServe it hot, sliced across into rounds an inch thick, with the custard poured over. The roll cuts into six to eight portions and does not reheat well — the crust goes gluey once it has cooled.
- The stray line at the end"1 bundle rhubarb 1½ lemon" belongs to another recipe on the page, not to this one. Ignore it.
"Dog in a blanket" is one of a family of British boiled-pudding names — alongside spotted dog, roly-poly and the grimmer dead man's leg — all describing a sheet of suet or biscuit dough spread with fruit or jam, rolled up, tied in a floured cloth and boiled for hours in a single pot. The form belongs to a kitchen with a hearth fire and no reliable oven, which is why so many nineteenth-century sweet puddings are boiled rather than baked. The compiler's note that this is "a Creole recipe over one hundred years old" is the author's claim rather than a documented provenance, but the substitution of sliced tart oranges for the usual jam, and the lemon custard poured over, does fit New Orleans practice, where citrus was cheap and local and the English pudding vocabulary sat comfortably beside French sauces. The baking powder in the dough dates this particular version rather than the dish: chemical leavening only became a household staple in American kitchens from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, so an older form of this pudding would have used suet and a lighter hand.