Home › Bread and Bread Making › Brownies (Cup butter egg well beaten cup)
Brownies (Cup butter egg well beaten cup)
1/3 cup butter 1 egg, well beaten 1/3 cup powdered sugar 7/8 cup bread flour 1/3 cup Porto Rico molasses 1 cup pecan meat, cut in pieces Mix ingredients in order given. Bake in small shallow fancy cake tins, garnishing top of each cake with one-half pecan.
An early, chocolate-free brownie: a molasses and pecan cake baked in small tins. The batter is stiff and unleavened, so the texture depends entirely on the beaten egg and on not overbaking.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Molasses batters in small tins bake well at 350F; expect 12 to 18 minutes depending on tin size. They are done when the centers are just set and spring back lightly.
- "Porto Rico molasses"A cane molasses from Puerto Rico, sold in the period as a table-grade syrup and not a blackstrap. Ordinary unsulphured molasses is the right substitute; blackstrap will make these bitter.
- 7/8 cup bread flourThat is one cup less two tablespoons. Cookbooks of this period routinely distinguished bread flour from pastry flour and called for bread flour by default; modern all-purpose flour gives a more tender crumb and is the better choice here.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this period the term means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Use superfine or ordinary granulated.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda, and none is wanted. The rise comes from the beaten egg, so beat it until thick and pale and fold the flour in rather than stirring hard.
- "Small shallow fancy cake tins"Small fluted or shaped tins of roughly two to three tablespoons capacity. A mini-muffin pan or small tartlet tins work; grease them well, as the molasses makes the cakes stick.
- Pecans"Pecan meat" is simply shelled pecan kernels. Reserve enough halves to top each cake before baking, and press them in lightly so they do not slide off.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 small cakes. They keep several days in a tin.
Before the word attached itself to a chocolate square, "brownie" in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s could mean a small, dark, individually baked cake, often browned by molasses rather than chocolate. This version — butter, egg, sugar, molasses, flour and a full cup of pecans, baked in fancy tins with a nut set on each — matches the brownie printed in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 almost word for word. The name is generally traced to the little brown sprites of Scottish folklore, made popular in the United States by Palmer Cox's Brownie books, which began appearing in the 1880s, though the connection is traditional rather than documented.