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Bangor Brownies
3 squares chocolate 1/2 to cup flour 1 cup nut meats 1 teaspoon salt Put all ingredients in bowl and beat until well mixed. Spread evenly in buttered baking pan. Bake and cut in strips. 3 eggs 1½ cups brown sugar ¼ cup of flour
The text has come down garbled — the ingredients are split across two lists and at least one line has lost a fraction — so read the whole thing before you start and expect to make judgement calls.
- Reconstruct the ingredient list firstAs printed, the ingredients run: 3 squares chocolate, flour (amount corrupted), 1 cup nut meats, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 eggs, 1½ cups brown sugar, ¼ cup flour. The two flour entries may be a single line broken in typesetting; if so, ¼ cup is a workable figure for a batter this rich in eggs and sugar, but the original amount cannot be recovered with certainty.
- No fat is listedMany Bangor brownie recipes of the period include butter, commonly a third to a half cup, melted with the chocolate. Nothing here supplies any fat beyond the buttered pan. Whether that is a printing loss or the recipe as intended cannot be settled from the text.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1 oz block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 3 oz total. Melt it over hot water before mixing; the instruction to "put all ingredients in bowl" assumes it is already liquid.
- The saltA full teaspoon is high for a single small pan by modern palates. A quarter teaspoon is closer to current practice, particularly if salted butter is used.
- "Bake" with no temperatureThe recipe gives none. For a pan this size, 350F for 25 to 30 minutes. The centre should still be slightly soft; the strips firm as they cool.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square pan gives the right depth. Cut while barely warm; "cut in strips" indicates bars, and around 16 pieces is a reasonable yield.
- Nut meatsWalnuts or pecans, coarsely broken rather than chopped fine. Pre-shelled nuts should be tasted for rancidity before they go in.
Brownies as we know them are a turn-of-the-century American invention, and the "Bangor" name is traditionally traced to Bangor, Maine, where a local cook is said to have produced the chocolate version; the attribution is folklore rather than documented fact, but the name stuck and appeared on recipes in print for decades. The chocolate here is measured in squares, as it was in cookbooks generally, "squares" being the universal unit for baking chocolate rather than the mark of any one manufacturer. Recipes of this kind, circulated free or cheaply by chocolate and baking-powder companies, did much of the work of turning a regional bar cookie into a standard item in the American repertoire.