Brownie: How did this dessert originate and become so popular all over the world?
Brownie, we all know, is a baked chocolate dessert. However, it is not considered as a cake. This is because, while having a texture comparable to cakes, it is classified as finger food, which can be eaten with fingers (cakes are usually eaten with a fork!). Brownies are made with chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, cocoa powder, all-purpose flour, salt and baking powder. After the batter is made by mixing these ingredients, it is baked for around 30 minutes at 180° Celsius and your brownie is ready! Ever wondered how did this sweet treat originate and become so popular? Let us unravel the story for you.
Brownie: The many origin stories
There are many theories regarding the origin of this globally renowned dessert. According to one theory, a chef unintentionally added melted chocolate into the dough while making biscuits. Another school of thought suggests that a group of people were going to bake a cake, but didn't have enough flour. That’s how brownies came to be! Wait, there’s one more! Food experts also suggest that a housewife in Bangor, a city in the state of Maine, USA, forgot to add baking powder while making a chocolate cake and this is what resulted in the invention of brownie. However, the most widely accepted story is that the chefs at Chicago's Palmer House Hotel invented the tasty delicacy for the World Columbian Exhibition in 1893.
The story of Bertha Palmer
The most well-known backstory for the invention of the brownie is that of Bertha Palmer, wife of Palmer hotel owner Potter Palmer, in Chicago. She was the president of the Board of Lady Managers, a humanitarian organisation based in the USA. Event organisers had asked her to design a dessert for the ladies attending the Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893. Palmer went to the hotel's pastry chefs and instructed them to make a dessert that was easier to consume than a slice of pie and smaller than a layer cake. It should be small enough to fit in packaged lunches. The result was a brownie baked with twice as much chocolate as regular brownies (that we make today), walnuts and apricot sauce.
Chocolate is added to brownies
Fanny Farmer, an American cook, was the first to publish a recipe for brownies in a cookbook in the 1896 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook. But chocolate was missing in her recipe! She had baked a blondie, which is a brownie made with vanilla extract and brown sugar, instead of chocolate and cocoa powder. So, when did chocolate and brownie come together? Through advertisements in the USA, we might say! There were two advertisements featuring brownies in the late 1890s. In 1897, the first advertisement featured brownies in Sears and Roebuck, an advertisement catalogue in Chicago. But whether the recipe used chocolate or molasses (thick, dark brown liquid derived from raw sugar) was still unclear. The second advertisement from an 1898 issue of the Kansas City Journal, finally offered chocolate brownies. This was the first time chocolate and brownies were mentioned together.
The first recipe for chocolate brownies
In 1899, The Machias Cookbook, a cookbook created by the residents of Maine, published the first recorded recipe for chocolate brownies under the name Brownie's Food. The recipe included all the essential ingredients for a brownie: Chocolate, flour, milk and baking soda! Then, it appeared again in 1904 in a cookbook with a recipe for Bangor Brownies released by The Club of Chicago. The recipe was still only being circulated in the United States. So, how did it travel to the rest of the world?
Well, in 1906, Fanny Farmer released an updated edition of her cookbook with two brownie recipes: One for blondies and one for brownies. Soon after that, the brownie recipes began to circulate across the country and took over the entire world! Nowadays, several brownie recipe variants are available, including those with peanut butter or strawberries. Yet, chocolate continues to be a favourite!