A Real Roly-Poly Pudding

The Weekly Machen

The following article is the third in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express. For more information, see Little Sights of London. 

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A Real Roly-Poly Pudding
War No Warranty for Bad Cooking
by
Arthur Machen
September 26, 1918

A few years ago, I remember, a party of explorers penetrated in the icy fields of the Pole, experienced all the horrors of the frozen region, looked death itself in the face, and returned again, bringing back tidings.

Everybody was curious to know about their adventures, their emotions; what they had felt, what they had desired in that dark and icy night? And, so far as I remember, the reply was that, walking, they thought about jam roll, and sleeping, they dreamed of treacle puffing.

Very good; then let me not endeavour to be more heroic that the heroes, to be superior to those men who were so infinitely more daring than the common race of mortals. If they may think of puddings, why, so may we. And I want to say: when are we going to see those simple things again in their unpretending honesty here in England?

The other day I was having lunch at a tavern of decent and established repute, situated somewhere in the centre of London. The man opposite me ordered “jam roll” in simple faith. I observed the portion that was put before him. I grieve to say that it was a sham.

In the true jam roll or—to call it by its honest old name—roly-poly pudding, the jam is an essential part of the whole, like the ornament in Gothic architecture. It has its place between each encircling roll of suet crust; it is cooked with the crust; it bubbles out rejoicing from the folds of crust when the knife touches it. This is the roly-poly pudding that helped to make us Britons and gave us the might to beat Boney down.

But the thing that they served the poor man at the tavern table was, as I say, a sham. It was a circle of suet crust, on which, at the last moment, a little dubious jam had been poured. He ate it without complaint; very likely he knew no better. Or, perhaps, he reflected that there was a war on, which would naturally prevent the cook from putting the jam inside the pudding instead of outside.

Then it struck me that I had consumed my portion of mashed potatoes in humble silence; although these mashed potatoes were curiously marbled and veined with stray portions of cabbage, unordered by me. I suppose I thought that the cook had thus symbolised his natural and praiseworthy and patriotic anxiety as to the situation on the western front. I daresay that if I were a cook and were mashing potatoes and thinking of the war I might do the same. It may even be a kind of augury: “Foch beats Hindenburg; he beats hum not”; a scrap of cabbage leaf into the potatoes with every phrase.

But, seriously—or almost seriously—is it not time that we restored the good, honest, plain meal with our other ancient virtues? The war has nothing to do with it, really. War meals may necessarily be scanty in quantity, but they need not be nasty nor ill-prepared. Uncertainty as to the exact position of the Czecho-Slovaks does not, in sober fact, excuse the mingling of morsels of greens with mashed potatoes; and I am sure that roly-poly pudding can be properly prepared, even if the huns are putting the 1920 class into the firing line.

 

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