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Cranberry Roly Poly
A rather short biscuit dough is rolled out half an inch thick and spread with a layer of chopped cranberries and granulated sugar. This is rolled up, laid on a buttered plate, steamed for forty minutes, then placed in the oven for ten minutes to dry off. With this roly poly either hard or soft sauce may be served.
The instructions are a sketch rather than a formula, so the quantities and the steaming setup need filling in. Nothing here is difficult, but the roll must be sealed properly or the cranberry juice will run out into the steamer.
- Seal the endsThis is the hinge. Chopped cranberries throw a great deal of juice as they heat; pinch the long seam firmly, fold and pinch the ends closed, and lay the roll seam side down. An unsealed roll leaks its filling and steams into a soggy shell.
- "A rather short dough"Short means high in fat: a baking-powder biscuit dough of roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter or lard cut in, and about 3/4 cup milk. Handle it as little as possible once the liquid goes in.
- Filling quantitiesThe original gives none. About 2 cups raw cranberries, coarsely chopped, with 3/4 to 1 cup granulated sugar suits a roll made from the dough above. Cranberries are sharp enough that skimping on sugar shows.
- The buttered plateA heatproof plate or shallow dish that fits inside a covered pot, resting on a rack or ring above an inch or two of simmering water. Butter it well and keep the lid on; top up the water if it runs low over the forty minutes.
- Drying off in the ovenThe original gives no temperature, only ten minutes in the oven. A moderate oven, in the region of 375F, is enough to set the surface and take away the steamed slickness. The pudding is already cooked at this point, so watch it for colour rather than time.
- Hard sauce and soft sauceHard sauce is butter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring, chilled until firm and sliced onto the hot pudding. Soft sauce is a pourable sugar-and-butter sauce thinned with cream, milk or hot water. Either is standard for steamed puddings.
- YieldA roll made from the dough suggested above should cut into roughly six slices. Serve it hot, in thick rounds.
The roly-poly is an English pudding form — a sheet of dough spread with jam or fruit, rolled, and boiled or steamed in a cloth — that American cookbooks adopted wholesale and then filled with whatever was cheap and local. Cranberries were exactly that: commercial cultivation on Cape Cod bogs, generally traced to the early nineteenth century, had made the berry a standard autumn and winter fruit in the Northeast, and it kept well in a cold cellar long after softer fruit was gone. The steamed pudding is often said to have suited a kitchen where the stovetop was always in use and oven heat was worth conserving; here the oven is called on only for ten minutes at the end, purely to dry the surface. The choice of hard or soft sauce was the standard nineteenth-century pairing for any steamed pudding.