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Crisco Brownies
1/3 cupful molasses 1/3 cupful sugar 1/3 cupful Crisco 2 eggs 1 cupful flour 1 cupful chopped nut meats 1/4 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, molasses, extract, flour, salt and nuts. Divide into small fancy Criscoed tins , or bake in Criscoed sheet tin and cut in squares. Bake in moderate oven half hour. These are a cross between cake and candy.
Sufficient for twelve squares.
An early molasses brownie with no chocolate in it at all. The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete, which is the first thing to deal with.
- Missing quantitiesThe text gives only flour, nuts, salt and vanilla. The amounts of Crisco, sugar, eggs and molasses have dropped out of the page, and there is no honest way to reconstruct them from what remains. Treat this as a historical document rather than a working formula, or use a modern molasses-brownie recipe for the proportions.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F. Half an hour suits a shallow sheet pan; small individual tins will be done sooner, so check them early.
- "Criscoed" tinsSimply greased with shortening. On a modern nonstick or parchment-lined pan the step is redundant, though a light greasing still helps the edges release cleanly.
- Nut meatsPeriod shorthand for shelled nuts; walnuts and pecans were common choices in American baking of the period, though others were used. Chop them coarsely.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the grocery molasses of the period and will dominate the vanilla.
- "A cross between cake and candy"The intended texture is chewy and dense rather than risen. There is no chemical leavening, so do not beat air in after the flour goes in, and pull the pan while the centre is still slightly soft.
- YieldTwelve squares from one cupful of flour implies a thin bake in a small pan; the recipe does not name a size.
Crisco appeared in 1911, and the promotional cookbooks that followed it were written to prove the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere a household used them, brownies included. The recipe is a useful reminder that "brownie" did not originally mean chocolate: the earliest printed versions, from the turn of the century onward, are often molasses- or nut-based bars, and the name is generally traced to their brown colour rather than to any particular ingredient. Chocolate brownies existed alongside them and eventually took the word over entirely, which is why a chocolate-free brownie now reads as an error rather than a variant. The description "a cross between cake and candy" is doing the same work a modern headnote does, telling a cook who has never met the thing what to expect from the pan.