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Chocolate Brownies
1 cupful sugar 6 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 eggs 2 squares chocolate 1/3 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful flour 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, chocolate dissolved in boiling water, salt, flour, vanilla, and nuts. Divide and spread thin in 2 Criscoed square pans and bake in slow oven from twenty to twenty-five minutes. Cut in strips and serve with ice cream. These are a cross between cookies and heavy cake.
Sufficient for fifty brownies.
A very early brownie, from a cookbook written to sell shortening, and it behaves differently from a modern pan of fudge brownies: only half a cup of flour, spread thin across two pans, and cut into strips to eat alongside ice cream.
- Spread thin, and mean itHalf a cup of flour and two eggs divided between two square pans gives only a thin layer, on the order of a quarter to a third of an inch. This is the hinge of the recipe: pile the batter into one pan and you are likely to get an underbaked slab rather than the crisp-edged, chewy strip intended.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two ounces total. Modern 1-oz squares from a 4-oz bar are the same thing; do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar.
- Dissolved in boiling waterChopped chocolate will not truly dissolve in three tablespoons of boiling water, but it will melt into a smooth paste if you stir it hard off the heat before adding it to the creamed mixture. Melt it in a bowl over hot water first if it looks grainy.
- CriscoSix tablespoons of shortening. Modern Crisco is reformulated (no longer hydrogenated to the same degree) but works as written; the same volume of melted butter gives more flavor and slightly crisper edges. "Criscoed" pans means greased pans.
- Slow ovenPeriod sources put a slow oven somewhere in the region of 300-325F. At the lower end a thin layer may take the full 25 minutes and dry rather than set; 325F for 18-22 minutes may suit a modern oven better, pulling them when the surface is just firm.
- PansThe size is not specified; 8-inch squares are the likely intent. Line them with parchment so the thin sheet lifts out whole for cutting.
- SaltThe Crisco called for is unsalted, so the salt is added separately. With salted butter, reduce it; with unsalted fat, a level 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon is fine.
- YieldFifty brownies means fifty small strips, roughly 1 inch by 2 inches, cut from the two sheets. Twenty-four larger squares is a more usual portion today.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the American black walnut. A full cup in this little batter means the nuts carry much of the structure.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, which is why shortening appears in the ingredient list rather than the butter a home baker would have reached for. Brownies themselves were still fairly new in print: recipes under that name begin appearing in American cookbooks in the late 1890s and spread through the first decade of the twentieth century, and the early versions are generally thinner and more cookie-like than the deep fudge squares of later decades. The note that they are "a cross between cookies and heavy cake" reads as the author explaining an unfamiliar thing to her readers, and the instruction to cut them in strips and serve with ice cream places them as a dessert accompaniment rather than a lunchbox bar.