The History of the Brownie - Origin Brownies

Born In The Early 20th Century...In Boston?

The brownie, one of America’s favorite baked treats, was born in the U.S.A.—we just aren’t quite sure where—although evidence points to New England in the first few years of the 20th century. Although cake-like and baked in a cake pan, the brownie is classified as a bar cookie rather than a cake. There are thousands of recipes, both “cake” types and “fudge” types. Either is perfectly correct—and delicious.

It’s easy to see that the brownie got its name from its dark brown color. But as with most foods, the origin of the brownie is shrouded in myth, even though it is a relatively recent entry to the food pantheon, first appearing in print in the early 20th century. The legend is told variously: a chef mistakenly added melted chocolate to a batch of biscuits...a cook was making a cake but didn’t have enough flour. The favorite, cited in Betty Crocker's Baking Classics and John Mariani’s The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, tells of a housewife in Bangor, Maine, who was making a chocolate cake but forgot to add baking powder. When her cake didn’t rise properly, instead of tossing it out, she cut and served the flat pieces. Alas, that theory relies on a cookbook published in Bangor in 1912, six years after the first chocolate brownie recipe was published by one of America’s most famous cookbook authors, Fannie Merritt Farmer, in 1906 (and the Bangor version was almost identical to the 1906 recipe).

The actual “inventor” will most likely never be known, but here’s what we do know:

Sources: Not Always Correct

Quite a few sources cite the first-known recipe for brownies as the 1897 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue, but this was a recipe for a molasses candy merely called brownies. The name honored the elfin characters featured in popular books, stories, cartoons and verses at the time by Palmer Cox; the Eastman Kodak Brownie camera was also named after these elves.

Larousse Gastronomique, regarded by many as the ultimate cooking reference, states that a recipe for brownies first appeared in the 1896 The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, written by Fannie Merritt Farmer—but that was for a cookie-type confection that was colored and flavored with molasses and made in fluted marguerite molds. However, as verified by Jean Anderson in The American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes Of The 20th Century, the two earliest published recipes for chocolate brownies appear in Boston-based cookbooks—the first in a later edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.

You can buy a copy of the 1896 Boston
Cooking-School Cook Book.

Culinary historians have traced the first cake “brownie” to the 1906 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, edited by Fannie Merritt Farmer. This recipe is an early, less rich and chocolaty version of the brownie we know today, utilizing two squares of melted Baker’s chocolate. We don’t know if Fanny Farmer obtained the recipe from another source, printed it as is or adapted it, or provided the name.

The second recipe, appearing in 1907, was in Lowney’s Cook Book, written by Maria Willet Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston. Ms. Howard, a protégé of Ms. Farmer, added an extra egg and an extra square of chocolate to the Boston Cooking-School recipe, creating a richer, more chocolatey brownie. She named the recipe Bangor Brownies; we don’t know why. Perhaps the original brownie recipe, published by Ms. Farmer, was submitted by a housewife in Bangor; or that said housewife improved upon that recipe and this was the one published by Ms. Howard. This is discussed more thoroughly in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, which is the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” for food lovers—two volumes and 1,500 pages on the history, manufacture and marketing of food in the U.S.

While the first brownie recipes were published and variations began to evolve in the first years of the 20th century, it took until the Roaring ‘20s for the brownie to become “the bee’s knees” of baked chocolate treats,* a position it maintains today.

Alas, unlike the immortality accorded to Ruth Wakefield, who invented the Toll House cookie in the early 1930s, the brownie’s originator will probably never be known.

*“The bee’s knees” is a Jazz Age idiom meaning something or someone considered extremely special. According to Mark Israel of the University of Ottowa, 1920s U.S. slang had a slew of similar phrases with the same meaning, including, but not limited to, “the cat's pajamas” and the less familiar “the eel’s ankle,” “the clam’s garter,” “the kipper’s knickers” and “the sardine's whiskers.”

Brownie

Brownie photo by Torvald Lekvam | IST.

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The Origin of The Brownie

Born In The Early 20th Century...In Boston?

Sources: Not Always Correct