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June 13
Menu: Strawberry Cocktail; Roast Lamb, Mint Sauce; Mashed Potatoes Carrots and Peas; Cherry Roly Poly; Coffee Cherry Roly Poly-Roll pastry or a baking powder biscuit dough very thin, about 18 of an inch in thickness, sprinkle with sugar, and dot with ripe stoned cherries. Roll like a jelly roll, press, and close the ends as tight as possible. Tie in a floured cloth, and cook in boiling water 2 hours, or steam in steamer 1 hour. Remove from cloth and serve on hot platter with the following sauce: 1/2 cup Crisco, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 egg yolk, 2 tablespoons wine, and 2 egg whites. Cream Crisco; add sugar, yolk of egg and wine. Cook over hot water until hot. Remove from fire and add beaten whites of eggs.
A boiled pudding of the old British sort, given a shortening-based dough and a foamy wine sauce. The dough and the wrapping matter more than the filling.
- The typo in the thickness"About 18 of an inch" is a printer's loss of the fraction bar: roll the dough 1/8 inch thick. Thicker and the centre of the roll stays gummy after two hours in the water.
- Crisco means shorteningUse any solid vegetable shortening for both the biscuit dough and the sauce. Modern Crisco is reformulated (no partially hydrogenated oil), which affects nothing here but the label.
- Seal the ends, then seal the clothThis is the hinge. Water getting in turns the roll to paste. Pinch the seam and both ends firmly, then wrap in a well-floured cloth with a pleat down the length to allow swelling, and tie the ends like a cracker, close to the roll.
- Boiling versus steamingTwo hours in boiling water or one hour in a steamer are not equivalent in result; the steamer gives a drier, lighter crust. Keep the water at a steady roll and top it up with boiling water so the pot never goes off the boil.
- CherriesSour cherries hold their shape and flavour better than sweet ones in a long steam. Stone them over a bowl and add the juice to the sugar, or the roll bleeds into the cloth.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1913In books of this period the term often means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either will work in the sauce; confectioners' gives a slightly softer, starchier body.
- The wineThe recipe says only "wine" and does not specify a type. A fortified wine, sherry or madeira, suits this sauce better than table wine, which makes it thin and sharp.
- Raw whites in the sauceThe yolk mixture is only warmed over hot water, and the beaten whites go in off the heat and are never cooked at all. Use pasteurized eggs, or serve the sauce to no one who should avoid raw egg.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, but a roll of this kind will serve roughly six to eight. Slice it thick, on the platter, and sauce each slice at the table; the sauce collapses if it stands.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble two years after the product's launch, was an advertising book in cookbook form, and its recipes sit alongside dated daily menus — hence the stray heading "Coffee" and the tag "June 14" attached to a dessert. The roly poly itself is much older and thoroughly British: a sheet of suet paste spread with jam or fruit, rolled, tied in a pudding cloth and boiled, a method that predates domestic ovens in most homes and survived long after them. What the book is quietly doing is substituting a vegetable shortening for the beef suet or lard that such a paste had always required, which was the whole commercial argument for Crisco — a fat that behaved like the animal fats in pastry and frying but kept without a cellar and carried no meat flavour. The foamy wine sauce belongs to the same period's repertoire of sweet sauces served over hot puddings, and here it too is built on creamed shortening rather than butter.