The Brownie Meets Chocolate

• The earliest known brownie recipe, published in "The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book," contains no chocolate. Instead, this 1896 recipe produces individual molasses cakes baked in tins. Food historians have not definitively proven who introduced chocolate to the brownie, but they have a few ideas: a cook who added cocoa powder to extend dry ingredients when she ran out of flour; the accidental addition of melted chocolate into biscuit dough; or, the most widely repeated theory, a Maine housewife who forgot to add baking powder to make her chocolate cake rise, so instead cut it into flat bars. This came to be reproduced as the Bangor brownie recipe.

Early Chocolate Brownies

• Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel made some early brownies in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition. A group of ladies planned to visit the fair and wanted a delicious yet portable dessert for their box lunches. The hotel chef responded with a confection made of butter, sugar, flour, eggs and plenty of chocolate, topped with apricot glaze and walnuts. In the next few decades, brownie recipes increasingly crept into cookbooks. One 1926 version described a raisin-packed brownie called “Sultana Sticks.”

Mixes Overtake Baking From Scratch

• By the 1960s, major food companies introduced packaged brownie mixes. Pillsbury, General Foods and General Mills vied for housewives’ shopping dollars. They sponsored bake-offs and recipe contests. Companies touted consistent results and convenience over cooking from scratch. In the 1980s, microwave brownies set a new standard for efficiency, taking people even farther from traditional home baking.

Modern Takes

• Like most modern consumer items, the variety of brownie options has become mind-blowing. Bakeries sell flavored brownies, including mint, coffee, peanut butter, caramel and raspberry. For both medical and recreational marijuana users, brownies are a THC delivery method. People who follow special diets -- such as vegan, low-carb or gluten-free -- can all find brownie recipes to suit them. One company even introduced a melatonin-laced brownie to induce sleepiness.