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Brownies
1 1/2 cup brown sugar. 1 scant cup butter. 2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons cinnamon. 1/2 cup nuts. 2 eggs beaten very light. 2 tablespoons of buttermilk. 1 scant teaspoon of soda. 1 cup chopped dates.
Drop in greased pan and bake.
A drop cookie rather than a pan brownie, and with no chocolate in it at all — brown sugar, cinnamon, dates and nuts do all the work. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what to do with butter and sugar, so most of the method has to be supplied.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the buttermilk and the flour sifted with the soda and cinnamon, and fold in the dates and nuts last. The dough should be stiff enough to hold its shape on the sheet.
- "Scant cup" of butterA scant cup means just short of the mark, so a little under 8 oz — 15 tablespoons or so rather than a full 16. Same convention for the scant teaspoon of soda: a level teaspoon with a little shaken off, not a heaped one.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits drop cookies of this size; they take roughly 10 to 14 minutes. Pull them when the edges have set and the centers still look soft.
- "Drop in greased pan""Drop" suggests a flat greased baking sheet rather than a square tin, though "pan" of the period could mean either. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls about two inches apart. Baked as a slab instead, the same batter would need considerably longer — allow 25 to 30 minutes — and comes out closer to a date bar.
- Soda and buttermilkTwo tablespoons of buttermilk is not enough acid to take up a full teaspoon of soda (the molasses in the brown sugar contributes some, but not much at this ratio). Reducing to a scant half teaspoon gives a cleaner flavor and less of a soapy edge.
- DatesChop them with a lightly oiled knife or scissors and toss with a spoonful of the measured flour so they separate in the dough rather than clumping.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies from this quantity. They keep well in a tin for several days and firm up as the dates lose moisture to the crumb.
- On the section headingIf the recipe turns up under Vegetables, that looks like an artifact of the book's arrangement rather than a clue about the ingredients.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and built her reputation on wartime economy cooking, which is why her recipes are so often skeletal — she assumed a reader with a working method already in hand and spent her words on proportions. This one is a useful reminder that "brownie" did not originally mean a chocolate square. The name is generally traced to the late nineteenth century, when the earliest recorded "brownies" were small molasses cakes baked in individual tins; chocolate versions are, by a tradition that remains contested, credited to Chicago and to Boston cookbooks of the early 1900s, and only gradually took the name over entirely. Date-and-nut versions like this one, leavened with soda and buttermilk and spiced with cinnamon, made sense in a household where dates were cheap, shelf-stable and sweet.