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Graham Brownies
1 cup butter (melted) 2 cups brown sugar 2 eggs tablespoons buttermilk 2½ cups Five Roses flour 2½ cups graham flour 1 teaspoon soda.
Put Roll thin and cut into squares. together with cooked dates between, or any other filling desired.
A rolled cookie dough, not the chocolate brownie the name now suggests: thin crisp squares sandwiched in pairs with a date filling. The printed page is both incomplete and garbled, so a little judgement is required before mixing.
- The missing buttermilkThe page reads simply "tablespoons buttermilk" with no number, and there is nothing to recover. Reading the balance of the recipe, 1 cup melted butter, 2 cups brown sugar and 2 eggs against 5 cups of combined flour gives a stiff, dry, distinctly short dough; a few tablespoons — somewhere around 3 to 6 — is what the proportions imply, but that is inference, not the book's word. Add the liquid last, a spoonful at a time, and stop the moment the dough coheres enough to roll.
- The garbled instruction"Put Roll thin and cut into squares. together with cooked dates between" is a typesetting scramble of two sentences. The sense is: roll thin, cut into squares, and put together in pairs with cooked dates between.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, with the bran and germ left in. Modern whole-wheat flour is the nearest substitute, though a coarse or "graham" whole wheat gives the sandy bite the original had. It absorbs liquid slowly, so let the dough rest ten minutes before rolling and it will crack less.
- Soda without acidOne teaspoon of soda for five cups of flour is barely any leavening, and with so little buttermilk there is not much acid to work with, though the two cups of brown sugar supply some of their own. Some of the soda will likely go unreacted, contributing to browning and a faint alkaline note of the kind associated with graham crackers. These are meant to be flat and crisp, not risen.
- No oven givenThe book assumes you know. Bake thin rolled graham squares at 350F, 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness, until the edges are set and the surface has just lost its shine. Rolled to about an eighth of an inch, they will go from done to bitter quickly.
- Rolling thinThis is the hinge. A thick square with a brown-sugar-and-butter crumb will be tough rather than short. Roll between sheets of parchment, chill the sheets briefly if the melted butter makes the dough slack, and cut with a knife or wheel rather than a stamp.
- Cooked datesPitted dates simmered with a little water and lemon juice until they break into a thick paste, cooled before use. It must be stiff enough to hold its shape — a wet filling will soak the squares within hours. Spread it on cooled biscuits, not warm ones.
- YieldAbout 5 cups of flour makes a large batch: roughly five to six dozen small squares, or thirty-odd sandwiched pairs. The unfilled squares keep well in a tin; fill them the day they are wanted.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued for coarse unsifted wheat meal against the fashionable white bread of his day; by 1913 his name had detached from his sermons and survived as a flour and a cracker. "Brownies" in a book of this period did not always mean chocolate — the word was also attached to small brown cakes and biscuits, and here it describes a dark, brown-sugar, whole-meal square. The recipe's habit of splitting the flour, half Five Roses white and half graham, is characteristic of the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households in large numbers; the white half keeps the dough workable while the graham half supplies the flavour. The vague instructions and the missing measurement are also of their period: these books were compiled from contributed recipes and assumed a cook who had made something like it before.