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Blackberry Roley Poley

A boiled pastry roll filled with blackberries and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Blackberry Roley Poley

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, lard, butter, and a pinch of salt.

  2. Add enough milk to form a soft dough, about 2 cups.

  3. Roll out the dough into a sheet ¼ inch thick.

Fill and boil

  1. Sprinkle blackberries and sugar over the dough, leaving a narrow margin at the sides.

  2. Roll the dough tightly and sew it up in a cloth with a 'felled' seam, leaving room for swelling.

  3. Place the cloth-wrapped roll in a pot of boiling water and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  4. Dip the cloth in cold water to loosen it, then turn out the roll.

  5. Serve cold with hard sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the filling together during boiling.
Lard
Adds tenderness and flakiness to the dough by coating flour particles with fat.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the dough.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough can form and become soft.
Blackberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and juicy filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the blackberry filling and balances their tartness.

The step that matters

Sewing the roll with room for swelling. The dough expands as it cooks, and a tight seal or no room to swell can let the cloth burst or the filling leak into the water.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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