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Baked Berry Rolls
Roll a nice rich biscuit dough thin, in the form of a large square or into small squares. Spread over with berries. Roll the crust and put the rolls into a dripping pan close together until full; then put into the pan, water, sugar and pieces of butter. Bake them. Serve any of the pudding sauces.
A berry roly-poly baked in its own syrup, closer to what most Americans now call a cobbler roll. The original assumes you know the proportions for the syrup, so those are the main thing to supply.
- The hinge: syrup in the pan, not just waterThe liquid poured around the rolls is what makes the dish; without enough of it the bottoms scorch and the crust stays dry. For a 9x13 pan of rolls, figure about 1 cup sugar, 1 1/2 cups water and 3 to 4 tablespoons butter dotted over, poured in around the rolls rather than over them.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. Any 9x13 baking dish with sides at least 2 inches high works; the rolls need to sit in liquid without it boiling over.
- "Rich biscuit dough"A baking-powder biscuit dough made with a generous hand of butter or lard, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup fat per 2 cups flour, and enough milk to make it soft. Roll it about 1/4 inch thick; thinner and it tears under the berries.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is browned and the syrup is thick and bubbling at the edges.
- BerriesBlackberries, raspberries or blueberries, about 3 to 4 cups. Toss them with a few tablespoons of sugar and a spoonful of flour before spreading, or the juice runs out and floods the pan while the rolls are still raw.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll the sheet up like a jelly roll, pinch the long seam closed, and cut into about 1 1/2-inch slices set cut side up. The recipe also allows the dough to be cut into small squares and each rolled separately. It says only to set the rolls "close together until full," which at least keeps them from slumping.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. On the dough proportions suggested above, expect roughly ten to twelve rolls, serving six to eight.
- "Any of the pudding sauces"The phrase points to sweet sauces given elsewhere in the book; the recipe names none. Hard sauce, a thin lemon or vanilla sauce, or plain cream are all plausible choices.
Berry roly-polys belong to the large nineteenth-century family of dough-and-fruit puddings that could be boiled in a cloth, steamed, or, as here, baked in the open in a dripping pan. Baked versions are common in American books of the period, and the syrup that collects in the pan does much of the work of a sauce. The instruction to "serve any of the pudding sauces" points to sauces kept in a chapter of their own and treated as interchangeable. Recipes of this kind also show how loose the line was between pudding, dumpling and what would later be standardized as cobbler.