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Brownies (Teaspoon vanilla cup flour)
¾ teaspoon vanilla ½ cup flour 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, melted ½ cup walnut meats, cut in pieces Mix ingredients in order given. Line a seven-inch square pan with paraffine paper. Spread mixture evenly in pan and bake in a slow oven. As soon as taken from oven turn from pan, remove paper, and cut cake in strips, using a sharp knife. If these directions are not followed paper will cling to cake, and it will be impossible to cut it in shapely pieces. 1/3 cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar 2 eggs 1 cup flour 1/3 teaspoon salt
The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription and the quantities run together; read it as a single list before starting. What follows sorts out the numbers and the vessels.
- The list, reorderedAs printed the ingredients are split across the method and partly garbled. The workable reading is: 1/3 cup butter, 1 cup powdered sugar, 2 eggs, 2 squares melted unsweetened chocolate, 3/4 teaspoon vanilla, flour (see below), 1/3 teaspoon salt, walnut meats (printed as 1½ cup, and likely garbled in the same way as the flour). The text says only to mix in the order given; on the usual reading that means creaming butter and sugar, then eggs, chocolate, vanilla, flour, salt and nuts.
- The flour is ambiguousFlour appears twice, as "1½ cup" and "1 cup," and the "34 teaspoon vanilla" is plainly a broken 3/4. Versions of this brownie generally carry well under a cup of flour for 1/3 cup butter and 2 eggs; a cup and a half would give a dry cake, not a brownie. Do not simply add both figures.
- Powdered sugarIn American cookbooks of this period "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Use ordinary granulated.
- Squares of chocolateA square of unsweetened baking chocolate is one ounce, so two squares is 2 oz. Melt over hot water and let it cool slightly before it goes into the creamed butter, or it will curdle the eggs.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. These are meant to set gently rather than crust; a hotter oven dries the edges before the centre is done.
- Paraffine paperWaxed paper, then the standard pan lining. Parchment does the same job better and releases more cleanly. Butter the pan lightly so the paper stays put.
- Turn out at onceThis is the hinge, and the recipe says so. Waxed paper welds itself to a cooling sugar-and-butter batter; invert the pan the moment it leaves the oven, peel the paper while the cake is hot, then cut.
- Pan and yieldA seven-inch square pan is smaller than the modern 8-inch standard, so the batter bakes thicker there. The recipe gives no time or yield; bake until just set and cut in strips as directed rather than squares.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is one of the earliest places the word "brownie" attaches to a chocolate bar cake; the 1896 first edition carried a Brownies recipe that contained no chocolate at all, being a small molasses and pecan cake baked in shallow tins, and the chocolate version arrived in later revisions. The name is generally traced to the colour rather than to any person, though a persistent story credits a Bangor, Maine, cook with the first chocolate version. What the recipe really records is a moment of transition: the creaming method and cup measures are Farmer's standardised system, while the paraffine paper lining and the instruction to cut in strips belong to a time before non-stick pans, when getting a rich cake out of its tin intact was the hardest part of the job.