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Brownies
2 squares chocolate
½ teaspoon salt
I/4 cup fat
½ cup flour
1 cup white sugar
½ cup nuts
1 egg
Melt chocolate and add it to the melted fat. Add sugar, egg, salt and flour. Mix in chopped nuts, pour in greased baking-pans, and bake at 360° F. about twenty-five minutes. They will look half baked, but mark off in squares or strips when you take them from the oven, and they will harden as they cool. Remove from the pans when cool. Serve with afternoon tea. These cookies resemble fudge in taste and appearance.
A very early brownie formula, closer to a pan of firm fudge than to the fudgy-cakey bars of today. Almost nothing needs changing, but a few of the terms and numbers deserve translation.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this calls for 2 oz total. Semisweet or Dutch-process chips are not a substitute here; with a full cup of sugar and no other liquid, sweetened chocolate throws the balance off.
- FatButter or vegetable shortening, 1/4 cup, which is 4 tablespoons. Butter gives more flavor; if you use salted butter, cut the half teaspoon of salt back to a pinch.
- 360 degreesAn oddly precise figure of a kind found in early-twentieth-century recipes written for ovens with heat regulators; why this exact number was chosen is not recorded. Set a modern oven to 350°F and lose nothing.
- Pan sizeThe original says only "baking-pans." This is a small batch: an 8-inch square pan gives bars about half an inch thick, which is right for the texture described. A 9x13 will produce something dry and brittle.
- The hinge is underbakingThe instruction that they "will look half baked" is the whole point and the reason the recipe works. Pull the pan when the center is still soft and glossy and the edges have just set; the sugar-heavy batter firms into fudge as it cools. Baking to a clean toothpick gives you a hard, sandy bar.
- Score warm, cut coolMark the squares or strips while the pan is hot, as directed, then leave them alone until fully cool before lifting them out. Cutting warm brownies of this type tears them.
- NutsHalf a cup of chopped nuts; walnuts and pecans are the usual choices. Toasting them first is not in the original but improves them.
- YieldAbout sixteen 2-inch squares from an 8-inch pan, or a dozen fingers if you cut strips for tea as the recipe suggests.
Brownies arrived late in the baking repertoire: the name appears in print in the 1890s, though the earliest "Brownies" in Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book were small molasses cakes baked in tins, not a chocolate bar at all. Chocolate versions spread through the 1900s and 1910s, and by the time this collection was assembled they were standard enough to need no introduction beyond the closing note that they "resemble fudge in taste and appearance." Origin stories attached to Bangor, Maine, and to the Palmer House hotel in Chicago are traditional rather than documented. The recipe's placement here, with the instruction to "serve with afternoon tea," is worth noting.