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Fudge Squares
1/2 cup butter, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup bread flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup chopped walnut meats, 1 teaspoon vanilla. Melt chocolate and add butter. Beat eggs, add sugar gradually and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt; then add chocolate and butter mixture, nut meats and vanilla. Spread evenly in buttered shallow cake tins having mixture one-half inch in thickness. Bake in a moderate oven ten minutes. Remove from pans and cut while warm in two-inch squares.
An early brownie under a different name. The batter is straightforward; the two things worth attention are the chocolate and the pan depth.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateThis was Walter Baker's plain unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes. Two ounces of any unsweetened baking chocolate substitutes directly; do not use semisweet, which will make the squares cloying against the full cup of sugar.
- Bread flourThe book means hard-wheat flour as distinct from soft pastry flour. Modern all-purpose is closer to what these squares want than today's high-protein bread flour, which will toughen them.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F; the ten-minute bake at this thickness suggests the warmer end of that range.
- Pan size and depthThe half-inch depth is the real instruction, not the pan named. The batter runs to roughly four cups, which gives that depth in a 9x13 tin or across two 8-inch squares. Deeper than half an inch and the ten-minute bake will leave the centre raw.
- TimingTen minutes is right only at that thickness, and only just. Start checking at eight: the top should look set and dull, the centre still soft. These are meant to be fudgy, and carryover heat in the pan finishes them.
- Cutting while warmFollow this literally. Cooled fully in the tin, the chocolate sets firm and the squares crack and crumb along the knife rather than cutting clean.
- WalnutsA full cup of chopped nuts in this quantity of batter is a lot by modern proportion, and it is structural here as much as flavour. Toasting them first is not in the original but costs nothing.
- YieldAbout two dozen two-inch squares.
Choice Recipes was one of the small promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the chocolate firm whose origins are traced variously to 1765, when James Baker backed John Hannon's mill in Dorchester, and to 1780, when Baker began trading under his own name, and which became the best-known American chocolate name of the nineteenth century. The booklets were assembled from recipes by well-regarded cookery writers of the day and given away or sold cheaply, with the company's products specified by name throughout, which is why the ingredient list calls for Premium No. 1 rather than simply chocolate. The name fudge squares suggests a moment when the word brownie had not yet settled on the thing it now describes: fudge was in vogue in American college and school kitchens around the turn of the century, and a dense chocolate square baked rather than boiled could plausibly be filed under that heading. Recipes of this shape, chocolate, butter, egg, a modest amount of flour and a heavy load of walnuts, appear in New England collections in the first decade of the 1900s, and the family resemblance to the modern brownie is obvious.