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Dessert

Roly Poly

A potato-based sweet roll made with mashed potatoes, flour, butter, buttermilk, baking soda, and dried fruit, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Roly Poly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine mashed potatoes, flour, butter, buttermilk, and baking soda in a bowl to form a dough. Add more buttermilk if necessary.

Fill and cook

  1. Spread the dough with dried currants, cherries, or preserved fruit.

  2. Roll the dough and tie it in a cloth.

  3. Immerse the tied dough in boiling water and boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with vanilla sauce or your preferred 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. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Mashed potatoes
Adds moisture and a tender, soft crumb to the dough.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the rolled dough together.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the dough.
Buttermilk
Moistens the dough and gives it a slight tang.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to help the dough rise.

The step that matters

Boiling the tied dough. The dough must stay fully submerged in steadily boiling water for the whole two hours. If the water drops below a boil or the cloth loosens, the pudding can cook unevenly or turn watery and heavy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, butter, buttermilk):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, butter, buttermilk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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