Tuesday 1 March 2011

The History of the Chocolate Brownie

Have you ever found yourself wondering where chocolate brownies came from?  Well, here at Simply Brownies we have and we've done a little bit of research and thought we'd share our findings!

There is much mystery surrounding the beginnings of the chocolate brownies we know and love today, including the following suggestions:

- A chef mistakenly added melted chocolate to a batch of cookies
- A cook baking a chocolate cake didn't have enough flour, resulting in a dense cake.
- A housewife in Bangor, Maine forgot to add baking powder to her chocolate cake, but rather than throw the cake out, she cut and served it in flat pieces and found it delicious!

However there appears to be no doubt that they are an American creation and most likely originated in New England around the turn of the 20th Century.

Most of our research points us to 1893 and the Columbian Exhibition which that year was held at the Palmer House Hotel.  It seems that Bertha Palmer (the owner of the hotel - her husband gifted her with the hotel as a wedding present!) requested of her chef a dessert for the ladies attending the fair which was to be smaller than a slice of cake and easily eaten from lunch boxes.  The creation she was presented with was very similar to the brownies we know and love today, but featured an apricot glaze and contained walnuts.  This version of the brownie is still being served to this day in the hotel's Lockwood Restaurant to the same recipe, click here for a link to food.com which details the recipe.

Following the Columbian Exhibition, several brownie recipes cropped up around the beginning of the 20th Century, the first in the 1986 version of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book though these were made with molasses (a dark sugar syrup similar to black treacle) and nothing like the brownies we enjoy today.  

Following this there was a recipe printed in the Boston Globe on 2nd April 1905 for "Bangor Brownies", these had no baking powder and were probably similar to those made by the housewife who almost threw out her chocolate cake.

Then Fannie Merritt Farmer (one of America's most famour cookery authors) published a copy of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book in 1906, those these were a rather mild, more cake-like version of the brownie and it wasn't until her protégé Maria Willett Howard published a recipe for Lowney's Brownies in Lowney's Cook Book in 1907 with an extra egg and more chocolate that something which more resembled the brownies of today was born.

Chocolate brownies became increasingly popular in the 1920s when chocolate was more readily available and eventually made their way around the world.

Today, there are still several different recipes for chocolate brownies (our own remains a closely guarded secret and only available from our website!) but it's the melted chocolate and butter which give a brownie it's fudgy texture and the high sugar content which gives them that delicious crispy topping....mmm....