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Roly-Poly
(England.) Make a good stiff batter, using eggs and milk, etc., roll it out thin, spread a layer of jam or marmalade evenly, fold it up, dust with flour, and tie in a cloth. Boil it 1 1/2 hours, drain, untie, and serve, in slices, with wine or cream sauce.
A very compressed set of directions for one of the standard English boiled puddings. The wording says "batter" but the method it describes — rolling out thin, spreading jam, folding and tying — is only possible with a stiff dough, so read it as pastry.
- Read "batter" as suet crustRead "batter" as a stiff dough. The recipe names only eggs and milk, but roly-poly was commonly built on a suet crust — roughly 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, a pinch of salt and about 3/4 cup shredded suet, bound with milk (or milk and an egg) to a firm, rollable dough. Anything pourable will not hold jam or survive a cloth.
- Suet, and what to use insteadShredded beef suet was a common butcher's item around 1900 and is still sold frozen or as packaged shredded suet in Britain. Frozen grated butter or lard at the same weight can be substituted, though the crust will be less light and spongy.
- Roll and fillRoll to about a quarter inch, leaving a clear inch of border so the jam does not escape at the seam. The recipe says "fold it up", though rolling it up and pinching the ends closed is the more usual handling.
- The pudding cloth is the hingeScald the cloth, wring it out and flour it generously on the inside face; the recipe's "dust with flour" may refer to this, or to flouring the pudding itself. Tie loosely enough to let the crust swell. A tight cloth gives a dense, leaden pudding.
- Boiling itThe pudding goes into water already at a rolling boil, on a rack or inverted plate so it does not sit on the pan bottom, and the water must be topped up with boiling water so it never drops off the boil. The recipe's ninety minutes suits a pudding of ordinary size; a noticeably smaller one will need less.
- Foil and parchment alternativeA sheet of buttered parchment under a sheet of foil, pleated to allow expansion and tied at both ends, steams over simmering water and is easier to handle than a cloth; allow at least as long as boiling, and check before turning out.
- Wine sauceThe period wine sauce is a sweetened, thickened sauce of sherry or Madeira, butter and sugar, served hot. Cream, custard or simply more warmed jam thinned with a spoonful of water all work.
- YieldServes four to six in thick slices. It must be eaten hot; a cold roly-poly sets firm and greasy.
Roly-poly belongs to the family of English boiled suet puddings that stretches back to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from having to stuff a pudding into an animal's gut and made a boiled dough possible on any hearth with a pot. The rolled, jam-filled version is a nineteenth-century schoolroom and nursery staple, cheap in flour and suet and generous in bulk, and it collected an affectionate list of nicknames — "dead man's arm" and "dead man's leg" among them, often said to come from the way it emerged pale and cylindrical from its cloth. Its appearance here under the flat label "(England.)" reflects the design of the book, which gathers dishes as national specimens for an American reader.