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Crisco Brownies
1/3 cupful sugar 1/3 cupful Crisco 1/3 cupful molasses 2 eggs 1 cupful flour 1 cupful chopped nut meats 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, molasses, extract, flour, salt and nuts. Divide into small fancy Criscoed tins, or bake in Criscoed sheet tin and cut in squares. Bake in moderate oven half hour. These are a cross between cake and candy.
Sufficient for twelve squares.
An early brownie in the original sense: no chocolate at all, sweetened with molasses and packed with nuts. A few notes before you start.
- No chocolate, and that is not an omissionThis is a molasses-and-nut bar, closer to a chewy blondie than to anything a modern reader expects. Adding cocoa will throw the moisture balance off; make it as written or make a different recipe.
- "Criscoed"Simply greased with shortening. Crisco is still sold and behaves as intended here, but any solid vegetable shortening works; butter will brown the edges faster and change the flavour toward toffee.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F, though period sources put a moderate oven anywhere from 350 to 375F. Treat the half hour as an outer limit rather than a target.
- TimingHalf an hour is long for a thin bar with this little flour. In small fancy tins start checking at 18 minutes, in a sheet tin at 22. Pull them when the centre is just set and slightly domed; they firm considerably as they cool.
- Pan sizeNo dimensions are given. One cup of flour and two eggs suits an 8-inch square tin for a bar about half an inch thick, which would divide into roughly twelve squares.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate a batter this small.
- Nut meatsShelled nuts, historically walnuts, hickory nuts or pecans. A full cup against one cup of flour is deliberate; the nuts are structural here, not a garnish.
- Yield and keepingTwelve squares. The molasses keeps them moist for three or four days in a tin, and they improve overnight.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company brought out in 1911; the recipes throughout use the product. The recipe is also a reminder that the brownie began without chocolate. The earliest printed brownies, generally traced to Boston cookbooks of the 1890s, were molasses-sweetened nut bars, and the chocolate version only crowded them out over the following decades.