Sorry, Bangor

There’s a small but vocal minority of brownie lovers out there who maintain to this day that chocolate brownies were invented in Bangor, Maine…the famous “Bangor Brownie.” According to one version of the story, brownies came into the world when a woman named “Brownie” baked a chocolate cake and — you guessed it — it fell. The truth is…well, who knows? What is known for sure is that the first Bangor Brownie recipe was published in 1912 in the Girl’s Welfare Cook Book, a full seven years after Fannie Farmer published her recipe in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.