Brownie Day

What the day is

Brownie Day is observed on December 8. The brownie is one of the few desserts that is unambiguously American in origin, and it is younger than most people assume.

Origin and background

The best-supported origin story places it at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago in the 1890s, where a dense chocolate cake bar was reportedly made for women attending the 1893 world's fair, designed to travel in a boxed lunch without falling apart.

The printed record runs alongside that. A recipe called Brownies appears in the 1896 edition of a well-known Boston cookbook, but it is molasses-based and contains no chocolate at all. A chocolate version appears in the same book's 1906 edition, which is roughly when the thing we now mean by the word settles into place. Other towns have competing claims, and the popular story that the brownie was invented when a cook forgot the leavening is folklore with nothing behind it.

The technical questions are more useful than the origin dispute. Fudgy versus cakey is largely a matter of ratio: more fat relative to flour, fewer eggs and little or no chemical leavening give a dense bar, while the reverse produces something closer to chocolate cake.

The shiny, papery, crackly top that people actually want has a specific cause. It forms when sugar is fully dissolved into the eggs before baking, so that a thin sugar and egg layer rises to the surface and sets there like a meringue. Beating the sugar with warm melted butter and the eggs long enough to dissolve it is what produces the crust. Stirring everything together quickly does not.

How to take part

• Beat the sugar, melted butter and eggs until the mixture is visibly glossy. This is the crackly top step.
• Underbake slightly. A skewer should come out with moist crumbs, not clean.
• Let them cool completely before cutting, however difficult that is.
• Add salt, and more than the recipe says. Chocolate and salt do a great deal for each other.
• Try both a melted-chocolate and a cocoa-powder version to see which texture you prefer.