Home › Doughnuts and Cookies › Fudge Squares
Fudge Squares
1/3 cup milk 1/8 tsp. salt 1 tsp. Royal bak. powder 1 cup flour 1/2 cup nuts Melt shortening, add sugar and egg, add chocolate, vanilla and milk. Add flour, sifted with baking powder and salt. Add nuts, mix well. Spread thinly on greased pan and bake 20 to 30 minutes, and cut in squares.
— Mrs. Joseph Legg
A community-cookbook brownie, printed with the ingredient column clipped: the method calls for shortening, sugar, egg, chocolate and vanilla that never appear in the list. What survives is 1/3 cup milk, 1/8 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup nuts.
- Missing quantitiesThe fat, sugar, egg, chocolate and vanilla amounts are genuinely absent from the page rather than merely archaic, so no honest conversion can be given. For a 1 cup flour brownie of this era the usual proportions run around 1/2 cup shortening, 1 cup sugar, one or two eggs, two squares of chocolate and a teaspoon of vanilla, but that is inference, not the original.
- Chocolate means baking chocolate"Chocolate" in a book of this vintage most likely means unsweetened baking chocolate, commonly sold in 1 oz squares and melted before use. Chocolate chips or eating chocolate would throw both the sugar and the fat off.
- ShorteningHousehold shortening then usually meant lard or an early hydrogenated vegetable fat; butter can be used instead. Note that the recipe melts the shortening first and adds sugar and egg before the chocolate.
- Royal baking powderContributors to these books routinely named the brand they used. A modern double-acting baking powder can stand in, measure for measure, in practice.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern choice for a thin chocolate batter, with the recipe's 20 to 30 minutes as a guide.
- Pan and thickness"Spread thinly" is the instruction that matters. A 9x13 inch pan gives a thin square; a smaller 8x8 pan will roughly double the depth and is likely to need longer than the stated time.
- CuttingCut while barely warm rather than straight from the oven, when the squares tear.
- YieldA cup of flour spread thin in a 9x13 pan gives roughly 24 small squares.
The Philathea cook book belongs to a large family of American church and Sunday-school fundraising volumes, typically compiled from members' handwritten recipes and set in type quickly and cheaply; dropped lines like the missing ingredient column here are the sort of casualty that process invites. The bar-cookie form became widespread in the early twentieth century, alongside the ready availability of unsweetened baking chocolate and canned baking powder, and recipes of this shape belong broadly to the same period as the earliest printed brownies. The attribution to Mrs. Joseph Legg, wife's name subsumed into husband's, is the standard convention of these books and the closest thing they offer to a byline.