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December 13
Menu: Chestnut Soup; Pork Chops, Apple Sauce; Steamed Squash; Potatoes; Lettuce and Pepper Salad; Raisin Roly Poly; Coffee Raisin Roly Poly-2 cups flour, 2 cups breadcrumbs, 3/4 cup Crisco, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 14 pound stoned raisins, 14 tablespoon salt, and cold water. Rub Crisco well into flour, breadcrumbs, sugar, salt, and add raisins stoned and halved. Add enough water to mix whole into soft paste. Roll into neat shape. Roll up in floured and scalded pudding cloth, tying ends securely. Put in pan of fast boiling water, and let boil steadily for 3 hours. Take off cloth, and serve pudding on hot dish.
A boiled suet-style pudding with Crisco standing in for the suet, cooked in a cloth rather than a basin. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth and the water level decide whether it succeeds.
- The fractionsThe quantities printed as "14 pound" raisins and "14 tablespoon" salt are quarter measures: 1/4 lb (about 3/4 cup) raisins and 1/4 tablespoon (a scant teaspoon) salt. A full pound of raisins would overwhelm this amount of paste and a tablespoon of salt would make it inedible.
- Crisco in place of suetCrisco is a solid vegetable shortening and behaves like the beef suet this pudding was built on. Keep it cold and rub it in only to a coarse crumb; overworking gives a dense, greasy pudding rather than a light one.
- The pudding clothScalding and flouring the cloth is the hinge of the whole thing. The cloth goes into the pot wet, and the flour dusted over the damp cloth sets into a skin that keeps water out of the dough. A dry or unfloured cloth lets the pudding go sodden.
- Tying and room to swellWrap with room for the roll to expand as the flour and crumbs absorb water, even while tying the ends securely; a tightly bound roll splits its cloth.
- Keeping the boilThe water must stay at a genuine boil for the full three hours and the pudding must stay covered. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, which stops the cooking and can leave a heavy streak through the middle.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not fresh soft crumbs and not the sandy commercial kind. Fresh crumbs carry more moisture and you will need noticeably less water to reach a soft paste.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no serving count; a roll this size should feed roughly six to eight. Turn it out, slice thickly, and serve hot with a sweet sauce, custard, or simply cream; it stiffens quickly as it cools.
Roly poly puddings belong to the British boiled-pudding tradition that American cookbooks carried well into the twentieth century: a flour-and-fat paste, a floured cloth, and a pot of water standing in for an oven. This version appears in a Procter & Gamble promotional book whose purpose was to show that Crisco, introduced in 1911, could replace the animal fats a cook already knew, and suet puddings served that demonstration directly. The recipe carries the calendar date December 14; a raisin pudding boiled in a cloth was a plainer relation of the far richer Christmas pudding.