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Chocolate (Cream butter add remaining) (II)
Cream butter, add remaining ingredients, spread on buttered sheets, and bake ten to fifteen minutes. Cut in squares as soon as taken from oven.
This is the method half of a chocolate bar-cookie recipe; as reproduced here the ingredient list has been separated from the directions, so the proportions have to come from elsewhere.
- The missing ingredientsThe text begins mid-recipe: butter is creamed and "remaining ingredients" added, but the quantities are not on this page. Any chocolate bar batter in the Lowney style — butter, sugar, egg, melted chocolate, flour, and usually nuts — will behave as described, but do not guess at ratios from these lines alone.
- Buttered sheetsThe recipe specifies only "buttered sheets" and gives no depth. The short bake suggests a thin layer, so a shallow rimmed pan (a quarter-sheet, or an 8- or 9-inch square) is a reasonable modern stand-in, though a flat cookie sheet is not ruled out by the wording. Butter it well, or line with parchment.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given on this page. As a practical modern setting, 350F suits a thin chocolate batter; the ten-to-fifteen-minute time implies a thin layer.
- Cut while hotThis is the instruction that matters. A chocolate bar cooled in the pan sets firm and shatters or tears under the knife; scoring and cutting the moment it leaves the oven gives clean edges. Let the squares cool in the pan afterward so they finish setting.
- Judging donenessAt a thin depth the edges pull slightly from the pan and the center is just set when pressed. Since the proportions are not on this page, the intended texture cannot be settled from these lines; the short bake time does argue against baking to a fully dry tester.
- Creaming the butterHave the butter at cool room temperature, around 65F. Creaming by hand with a spoon against the side of a bowl is the method such books usually describe; a paddle attachment on low speed does the same work without whipping in so much air that the bar rises and then falls.
- YieldIf baked in a 9-inch square pan, a thin layer cuts into roughly 16 to 25 squares depending on how large you cut them. Stored airtight, they will keep a few days.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Hershey, published recipe collections to build household demand for its product. Books of this type are why so many American desserts of the early twentieth century call for squares of unsweetened chocolate by the ounce. The Lowney book is often cited among the early printed sources for the chocolate bar cookie that came to be called the brownie, and the method here — spread thin, bake briefly, cut hot — is close to what became the standard brownie technique.