Jam Roly Poly: why it’s time to revive this retro pudding

More than new pencil cases, name tapes, and the smell of school halls, back to school season always makes me think of proper puddings. There’s a category of pudding that seems reserved for properly old cookbooks, a handful of old-fashioned pubs, and dinner ladies. Spotted dick, cornflake tart, and jam roly poly.

Perhaps its ubiquity at school lunches accounts for its ghoulish alias: dead man’s leg or dead man’s arm. School children have a taste for the macabre, but to be fair to them when the pudding is unwrapped and before it is sliced, it does look fairly uninspiring, and not a hundred miles away from a pallid limb. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, before baking parchment and foil were widespread, the pudding would be steamed in a shirtsleeve. For those children for whom even these visuals aren’t sufficiently horrifying, there is Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding which sees Tom Kitten covered with butter and dough by the rats Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria, who plan to turn him into a roly poly, no doubt traumatising children for years to come.