Food & Drink 

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Brownie points

Indulge in a brief history of the gooiest of cakes

Chocolate brownies are what ‘real’ food should be about. The kind of food you can get stuck into, suck from your fingers and eat more of than you know you should.

Almost more thoroughly American than apple pie, nobody really knows the origin of this gloriously gummy cake bar, but the myths are as enticing as the brownie itself. The most popular version has it that Mildred Schrumpf, a home economics teacher in Maine, forgot to add the baking powder to the chocolate cake she was demonstrating to her class. With all the aplomb of a true leader of youth along the proper path, she did not reveal this lapse. She simply removed the flat, squidgy sponge from the oven, cut it into squares and announced she had cooked some ‘Brownies’.

Bostonians will dispute this tale. They have it that a local pastry chef was busy melting chocolate for a pudding with one hand while mixing the ingredients for butter cookies with the other when a fire broke out in the kitchen. Muddled by all the surrounding confusion involved in dousing it, he poured the chocolate into the biscuit batter. As reluctant as Mildred Schrumpf to broadcast his mistake, he baked the mixture, cut the level mass into rectangles and called them Boston Brown Bars.

This melodrama apparently took place in the 1920s, around the time of the Brownies debacle. But, sadly, neither of these lively accounts can be given any credibility. There are several mentions of ‘brownies’ in cookbooks published two decades earlier. The beleaguered Boston chef might even have been cooking from one of them – The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, whose 1906 edition contains a recipe for brownies with pecans. It is more likely that recipes for Brownies appeared on the wrappers of chocolate put out by the manufacturers in order to promote sales of more.

One thing is certain – no matter what country you’re in – brownies are a matter of personal taste and fierce argument. Often, a family has its own recipe – parting with it only under duress and with extreme reluctance. Some heap scorn on any version that goes beyond the basic ingredients of butter, chocolate, sugar, eggs, flour and pinch of salt. Additions of vanilla extract have been poo-pooed. Suggestions of flavouring with coffee or the use of white chocolate are greeted as sacrilege. In some quarters, mention of chopped walnuts or pecans may be met with derision, while others will insist a brownie is incomplete without a crunchy contrast. There was even a popular Californian health restaurant in the mid-1970s that added apricots to its brownie for extra succulence. Now you can also find different versions of brownies in every high street coffee house in the UK.

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