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Brownies
1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 sq. chocolate, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup nut meats, 1/2 cup flour, 1/4 tsp. salt. Cream butter and sugar, add remaining ingredients and spread on buttered sheets. Bake ten or fifteen minutes in quick oven. Cut in squares as soon as taken from the oven. 3 tbsp. shortening 1 cup sugar 1 egg 2 sq. chocolate 1/2 tsp. vanilla MAY WILEY
— Mrs. Walter H. Cole
— Mrs. Frank A. Kelley
A very early chocolate brownie: almost no flour, no leavening, and a batter thin enough to spread rather than pour. The result is closer to a chewy chocolate sheet than a modern cakey bar.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means two ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, melted. Bittersweet or semisweet will make the bars markedly sweeter and softer, since the cup of sugar is calculated against unsweetened.
- Ignore the "quick oven" hereA quick oven is generally taken as somewhere around 400-425F, hot enough to scorch a thin, high-sugar batter before the centre sets. Bake at 350F and start checking at fifteen minutes; the edges should be firm and the middle barely set.
- The pan"Buttered sheets" means a rimmed baking sheet or jelly-roll pan, not a deep cake tin. Spread the batter thin, about 1/4 to 1/3 inch.
- Melt the chocolate firstThe instruction to "add remaining ingredients" glosses over it, but the chocolate must be melted and cooled slightly before it goes in, or it will seize against cold eggs.
- Half a cup of flour is correctThat is not a misprint. The low flour and absent baking powder are what give these their dense, fudgy chew; adding more flour turns them into cake.
- Nut meatsPeriod shorthand for shelled nuts, here almost certainly walnuts or pecans, chopped. They are optional but the recipe was written expecting them.
- Cut while hotThe one instruction worth obeying literally. Cooled brownies of this type set hard at the edges and shatter rather than slice; score them into squares the moment the pan comes out.
- The orphaned second listThe five lines beginning "3 tbsp. shortening" read as an ingredient list for another recipe, printed without its method. Do not try to combine the two lists.
- YieldRoughly a couple of dozen small squares, depending on how thin the batter is spread.
The chocolate brownie is a genuinely American invention of the turn of the twentieth century, and community cookbooks like this one are where it spread. Printed brownie recipes begin appearing around 1900 — Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carried a chocolate one in its 1906 revision — and the name is confusing at first glance, since "brownies" in nineteenth-century books often meant small molasses cakes with no chocolate at all. The much-repeated story that the bar was created at Chicago's Palmer House for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition is traditional rather than documented. What is certain is that the recipe travelled through exactly this kind of book: the Philathea movement was a network of young women's Bible classes, Baptist in origin though interdenominational in practice, and their fundraising cookbooks gathered whatever their members were actually baking, which by the 1910s and 1920s increasingly meant chocolate. Three names are attached to this page, though the printed text does not say how the credit divides between the two ingredient lists.