When did someone first make the dessert called “brownie”?
I came across smacked of culinary fakelore: a fire in a Chicago hotel that caused a harried cook to combine a cookie batter with a cake batter; a New England housewife who forgot to add leavening to her chocolate sheet cake. A few sources attributed the invention of the brownie to one Mildred Brown “Brownie” Schrumpf (1903–2001), a home economics teacher in Maine who was also a columnist for the Bangor Daily News. That appeared to explain why many old versions of the dessert were called Bangor brownies—except that the earliest recipe for Bangor brownies I found appeared in the Boston Globe in 1905, when Schrumpf was still in diapers. Indeed, further research revealed that many culinary historians ascribe the word brownie not to a person but to elves, specifically the sweets-loving characters drawn by the Canadian illustrator Palmer Cox in the late 1800s. (I also found out that there’s a Scottish dessert made with brown sugar called broonies that may also take its name from those fictio
