Reader Henry writes in with some interesting questions: Thanks for your great posts on brownies. I’ve got a few questions: 1. Most fudgy brownies call for very little flour with the instructions that you should stop beating the batter as soon as no or very little flour is visible. I’ve tried this sort of recipes […]
READ ONI was surprised over the weekend at how many notes I received about my Fannie Farmer post, mostly from women, saying in essence that they had no idea women were making so many advances in Nineteenth Century America. Indeed so. I’m no Gender Studies professor, but I do know that one of our great societal […]
READ ONThis photograph is but a peek into the irretrievable past. How so? Because I’ve eaten all these already. Don’t judge me. I might even make them again this weekend. I’ll start by preheating my oven to 300 and preparing a baking pan as in the previous brownie recipe. Then I’ll combine my dry ingredients in […]
READ ONA couple of you good folks have already written in about the post down below, thinking that I’m insinuating that there’s no creative baking in Europe. All I can say to that is: are you nuts? Europe is the home of the finest, most exquisitely executed pastry in the world, and probably its best bread. […]
READ ONWhich, now that I think about it, I never posted. But it went something like: how could something like a brownie evolve in America, but not in Europe? Well Gerhard, if I had to boil it down to two words, they’d be “professional pride.” For you see, ever since European communal hearths evolved from do-it-yourself […]
READ ONDorie Greenspan calls these her “French” brownies, not just because she invented them while living in Paris, but because her point of departure was French fondant (which on that side of the pond is a kind of cake). All that is beside the point to me, as I consider this recipe to be the highest […]
READ ONYes, pretty much all old-school brownie recipes had nuts in them. If you don’t like nuts, just hang on, I’ll put up a recipe without them. These are about as moist a brownie as I like. Some recipes have so little flour in them, they might as well be fudge. Not being a fudge person, […]
READ ONThere’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 […]
READ ONA wonderful defense, in today’s Washington Post, of garden-variety tomatoes. Is it just me, or are the voices of food sanity beginning to join into a chorus?
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