Woah Nellie!
‘Roly Poly’ beats out ‘Banana Salad with Popcorn’ and ‘Breakfast Mackerel’ for first recipe of the new year
by Mary Jo David
In honor of the New Year, we’re now turning the pages of old Stockbridge Brief-Sun newspapers to rediscover Nellie Maxwell recipes from the year 1924!
As I perused the old January editions, I decided to skip right over the recipes for “Banana Salad with Popcorn” and “Breakfast Mackerel.” (You can thank me later!) Nellie also featured a few sweet potato recipes in the January editions, but I’ve never been a huge fan of these tuberous root vegetables, so I skipped right over them. FUN FACT: I just learned that sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family.
In the Jan. 17, 1924, edition, Nellie focused on uses for leftover pastry. This caught my eye, since I often freeze small portions of leftover pie dough after I roll out a pie crust. I decided the recipe for “Roly Poly” showed the most promise, since we’re big fans of apple desserts in our house. How could you go wrong wrapping apples in leftover pastry?
I set to work gathering my ingredients, chopping the apples, and mixing them with the raisins. The combination reminded me of “Apples and Ants”… a simple recipe featured in a children’s cookbook back when my kids were just toddlers.
In true Nellie fashion, she decided to forego specifying amounts, and instead left it up to the cook, with instructions like rolling a small circle of pastry “as large a one as the size of the family warrants.”
As one of seven kids raised by a mom who was one of nine, I found myself wondering if families back in the 1920s had much leftover pastry—or anything else for that matter. Some quick research yielded interesting information. According to an infoplease.com chart on U.S. Households by Size, Americans experienced a steep drop in the percentage of households with seven or more persons between 1900 and 1930 (from just over 20% in 1900 to not even 11% in 1930). But even with smaller families, if you think your budget is stretched nowadays, consider that, according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the average earnings in 1924 were $1,303!
Enough with Googling; it was time to head back into the kitchen to continue making the “Roly Poly.” I’m happy to report the recipe came together nicely even though I had to guess at most measurements. After eyeballing the pastry circle I rolled, I ended up chopping two large apples (for about 3 cups) and adding 3/4 cup of raisins. As instructed, I rolled those up in the pastry, forming a log shape, and placed the log into a baking pan. I sprinkled it with 1/4 cup of brown sugar and dotted that with 2 tablespoons of butter. Lastly, I heated up 5 cups of cider to pour over the log in the baking dish.
At this point, I was quite skeptical as I looked down into a baking dish of “Roly Poly” lying in a pool of liquid. It turns out, I was right to be concerned! After baking for 1 hour and 20 minutes, the top of the “Roly Poly” was nicely browned, but it was still lying in a barely thickened mass of cider.
The pastry had obviously broken open because I noticed loose raisins floating in the cider. Suddenly my “apples and ants” experiment looked more like I had uncovered a crypt from an episode of the old show “Bones”! When dishing out the dessert, the two end pieces held their form for the photo shoot, but the rest is a mess and not something I’d ever serve to company. The flavor, however, was very good—like tart apple pie in cider soup (my husband’s words, not mine). The only thing missing was a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
As I wrap of this month’s column, on behalf of my family and the late Nellie Maxwell, I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year—and good times in the kitchen in 2024!
Current photos by Mary Jo David.
Sources:
- com/us/family-statistics/us-households-size-1790-2006
- org/history-resources/teaching-resource/statistics-american-economy-during-1920s
