Home › Small Cakes of All Kinds › Brownies
Brownies
1 cup white sugar ⅔ cup butter 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon allspice 1 pound dates ½ pound shelled walnuts.
Stone the dates, chop dates and nuts fine. Bake in slow oven for 20 minutes.
Put dates and nuts in last. Grease pan well.
A terse contributor's recipe with the steps out of order — the last two sentences belong at the beginning and middle. Read it as: grease the pan, cream butter and sugar, work in flour and spices, then fold in the chopped dates and nuts.
- No chocolate, and that is correctThese are date-and-nut bars, not cocoa brownies. Non-chocolate 'brownies' -- small brown squares of various kinds -- appear in Canadian and American books of this period alongside the chocolate sort. Do not add cocoa expecting to fix an omission.
- Slow oven300F, or 325F at the outside. The sugar and dates brown fast, so the low heat is deliberate.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticTwenty minutes may be short -- depending on how thickly the mixture is pressed, a pan of this may want longer than the stated time in a slow oven. Judge by the edges pulling away and the centre feeling set rather than by the clock.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, closer to modern all-purpose than to cake flour. Plain all-purpose is the substitute; measure it scooped and levelled, not packed.
- No eggs, no liquid, no leaveningThis is the hinge. The dough is a stiff, crumbly shortbread-type mixture held together only by butter and the moisture of the dates. It will not pour or spread — press it into the pan with floured hands or the back of a spoon.
- Weights into volumesThe pound of dates is weighed before stoning, so reckon on roughly 2½ cups once pitted and chopped; half a pound of shelled walnuts is about 2 cups. That is a great deal of fruit and nut for 1½ cups of flour, which is why the bars hold together as much by stickiness as by crumb.
- DatesBuy pitted dates and check for stragglers. If they are very dry, a brief soak in hot water and a thorough drain makes them chop instead of shred.
- Pan and yieldA greased 9x13 pan gives thin bars; an 8-inch square gives thick, dense ones and needs longer. Cut into squares while still warm — cooled, the sugar sets hard and the bars fracture. Expect about 24 pieces.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to sell its Five Roses flour, and much of its contents came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which accounts for the clipped, out-of-sequence instructions here, written by someone who already knew how the mixture should feel and saw no reason to explain it. The recipe is also a useful reminder that "brownie" was not originally a chocolate word: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it attached to all sorts of small brown squares, and date-and-walnut versions like this one were common before the chocolate sense settled into place — a shift usually traced to turn-of-the-century cookbook printings. The lavish pound of dates points to the period as well.