Woah Nellie!

Scalloped Onions and Peanuts—100-year-old recipe is not all it’s cracked up to be

by Mary Jo David

Every month, I scour through four old issues of the Stockbridge Brief-Sun weekly newspaper to find a 100-year-old recipe to recreate. For example, to write this month’s Woah Nellie! column, I looked through the four issues from May 1923. Generally, I try to find recipes I consider “intriguing”—different but not so unusual that no one would eat the finished product.

To find this month’s recipe, I waded through recipes for potato pancakes, graham cracker cake, and cream of peanut soup, to name a few.

• Potato Pancakes: Scratch! Too ordinary.
• Graham Cracker Cake: This one almost made it to my kitchen until I got to the part about using mocha frosting between the layers. This girl does not do coffee—oops, I mean “mocha”—anything!
• Russian Rocks: Nellie suggested these cookies are best after being kept one week. First of all, who can keep cookies in the house for a week without eating them? Second of all, did Nellie not have deadlines? Well, I sure do, and mine leave no wiggle room for aging cookies!
• Cream of Peanut Soup: I already made two pots of soup this week, so definitely not feeling it.

Next I landed on a recipe for Scalloped Onions and Peanuts. Why the sudden run on peanut recipes, I wondered. That prompted me to do some googling, and not coincidentally, 100 years ago, George Washington Carver was busy discovering ways to help farmers improve their soil through crop rotation. And if you remember your history lessons, what he found is that one of the crops that helped add nutrients back into the soil was peanuts.

I like to think Nellie Maxwell—syndicated columnist extraordinaire—was tuned into new crop developments and capitalized on them for her recipe columns.

But enough of the history lesson, it was time to get cooking. The Scalloped Onions and Peanuts recipe (see clipping on this page) called for boiling onion quarters until tender. Nellie wasn’t one to get too specific in her recipes, so I had to guess at the number of onions—I used one and a half large sweet onions. Once tender, I drained the onions and layered them with ground peanuts. Again, I was left to guess at the amount of ground peanuts (Nellie, you’re killing me!), so I went with one cup. Next, she instructed to pour a well-seasoned white sauce over the onion/peanut mixture and top with buttered crumbs.

Alas—Nellie includes no recipe for the well-seasoned white sauce. Being a “well-seasoned” cook, I’ve had some experience making white sauces. So, I proceeded to mix together a combination of butter, whole milk, salt, and pepper into a lovely, thick white sauce. Keeping in mind the “well-seasoned” requirement, I also added to the sauce some newly dried fresh chives, garlic powder, onion powder, a pinch of poultry seasoning, and some paprika for good measure.

After topping the recipe with buttered panko bread crumbs, I baked the casserole in a moderate (350-degree) oven for 35 minutes for a nicely browned topping. Meanwhile, the delicious aromas coming out of the kitchen were raising my hopes for a 2023 peanut recipe revival.

Once the casserole was cooled slightly, it was time for a taste test. I thought it safest not to mention the peanuts before handing my husband his portion; calling it “scalloped onions” seemed like it would be enough for him to swallow. After a back and forth of “You try it first,” … “No, you try it first,” we both dug in at the same time. And we both said simultaneously—”It doesn’t taste like anything.” We were both right, but then he had to take it a step further and say, “It tastes like warm water!”

And I daresay, he hit the nail on the head; Scalloped Onions and Peanuts was definitely a dud. Next time I decide to experiment with onions and ground peanuts, I’ll order Pad Thai!