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Chocolate Brownies
1 cupful sugar 1/3 cupful flour 6 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful chopped English 2 eggs walnut meats 2 squares chocolate 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract ½ teaspoonful salt 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, chocolate dissolved in boiling water, salt, flour, vanilla, and nuts. Divide and spread thin in 2 Criscoed square pans and bake in slow oven from twenty to twenty-five minutes. Cut in strips and serve with ice cream. These are a cross between cookies and heavy cake.
Sufficient for fifty brownies.
The ingredient list was set in two newspaper-style columns and reads as nonsense in a single line; read it as 1 cup sugar, 6 tablespoons melted Crisco, 2 eggs, 2 squares chocolate, ½ teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons boiling water, ½ cup flour, 1 cup chopped English walnut meats, 1 teaspoon vanilla. The proportions are the hinge: half a cup of flour to a cup of sugar and two eggs is what makes these fudgy rather than cakey, and there is no leavening at all.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 squares is 2 oz. Dissolving it in 3 tablespoons of boiling water gives a thin paste that blends into the batter smoothly.
- Crisco and the creaming stepCrisco here is plain vegetable shortening; 6 tablespoons of melted butter behaves nearly identically and tastes better. Melted fat will not cream in the usual sense — beat it with the sugar until the mixture is smooth and glossy, then add the eggs.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300–325°F. That low heat suits a thin layer of high-sugar batter, but start checking a few minutes before the twenty minutes the recipe allows; the surface should be set and dull with a faint crackle.
- Criscoed square pansGreased square pans; the recipe does not say what size. In two ordinary 8-inch squares the batter would sit only about a quarter to a third of an inch deep, thinner than a modern brownie, and a single 9x13 pan gives approximately the same depth.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the American black walnut of the period. Black walnuts are far more assertive and will dominate 2 oz of chocolate.
- YieldFifty pieces from two thin sheets means narrow bars, on the order of an inch by two, rather than a modern brownie square; the recipe directs that they be cut in strips and served with ice cream.
- CuttingLet the sheets cool in the pans before cutting. Warm, they tear; fully cold, the thin edges snap cleanly under a long knife.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product introduced in 1911 that had no culinary tradition behind it — hence a whole book of recipes in which the fat is named as a brand and used as a verb ("2 Criscoed square pans"). The brownie was still novel enough that this recipe closes with a definition: "a cross between cookies and heavy cake." The often-repeated story tracing the brownie to Chicago in the 1890s is tradition rather than documented fact; the earliest printed recipes under the name appear around the turn of the century, with chocolate versions circulating in community cookbooks and in editions of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in the following decade. The low-flour, nut-heavy formula seen here is characteristic of those early versions, and the instruction to cut in strips and serve with ice cream places it as a dessert accompaniment rather than the lunchbox square it later became.