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Bangor Brownies
1/4 cup melted shortening. 1 cup molasses. 1 egg. 2 squares melted bitter chocolate 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon baking powder Few grains salt 1 cup nuts Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Mix the ingredients in the order given and beat thoroughly. Spread the mixture evenly on a cake pan that has been lined with oiled paper. Bake about 15 minutes in a slow oven 325°F. Remove the paper from the cake as soon as it is taken from the oven and cut into small squares or strips with a sharp knife.
The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — it opens mid-list with the chocolate and gives no sugar, eggs or butter, though the method assumes them. Read it as a fragment and expect to supply the standard proportions from another brownie recipe of the period.
- What is missingA 1920s Bangor brownie of this size normally took about 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar and 2 eggs alongside the 2 squares of chocolate, 1 cup flour and 1 cup nuts. Without them you have cocoa-flavoured flour, not batter.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is 1 ounce, so 2 squares is 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. "Bitter" here means unsweetened, not the modern bittersweet bar, which already carries sugar and will throw the balance off.
- OvenThe book gives 325°F outright. That is genuinely a slow oven for a cake pan of batter and produces a fudgy centre; 15 minutes is short even so, and a 9-inch square pan will want 20-25.
- Oiled paperOiled paper means what parchment does now. Butter or oil the sheet lightly rather than trusting it dry, and pull it off while the sheet is still hot as directed, or it welds on as the sugar sets.
- Pan size"A cake pan" is unspecified. An 8- or 9-inch square is the right footprint for this quantity of flour; anything larger gives a thin, dry sheet.
- NutsPeriod recipes of this type commonly call for walnuts or pecans, and they go in unroasted, since they toast in the pan. A full cup in this small a batter is a lot by modern habit and is part of what makes the old versions read as candy rather than cake.
- CuttingCut while warm with a long sharp knife as instructed, but let the sheet cool a few minutes first or the squares slump. Yield is roughly 16 small squares from an 8-inch pan.
Brownies appear in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and one early printed version is known as Bangor brownies, with the credit traditionally given to a Bangor, Maine housewife, a story that is repeated far more often than it is documented. What distinguishes the type is the ratio: barely enough flour to bind, a heavy hand with butter, sugar and nuts, and a deliberately slow oven so the middle stays dense.