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Dessert

Steamed Roly Poly

A steamed pastry filled with plum jam, made from suet, flour, water, and served with a butter, egg, and sherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and sherry work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Steamed Roly Poly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine suet, flour, baking powder, and salt. Add water and mix until a dough forms.

  2. Roll out the dough on a floured surface and spread thickly with plum jam.

  3. Roll the dough up tightly and place it in a greased tin.

Steam and make the sauce

  1. Steam for 1.5 to 2 hours.

  2. For the sauce, mix eggs, sugar, and butter in a bowl. Pour in the boiling sherry and mix well.

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. Plum + sherrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the dough rich and tender during steaming.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the rolled dough together.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the dough as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the sauce and help it set smooth and thick.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and adds body to its texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Roll the dough up tightly. A loose roll can open or trap gaps during steaming, so tight rolling keeps the jam inside and the layers even.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, sugar, butter, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, butter, sherry. 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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