Buzz
The other day, as I enjoyed a delicious brownie, I found myself wondering, “Who came up with this treat? I’d love to thank them personally.” This curiosity led me to dive into some research.
The story behind the creation of dishes can be complex, and the brownie’s origin is no different. Some tales suggest a chef accidentally combined melted chocolate with biscuits or perhaps lacked enough flour for a cake; others claim a housewife in Bangor, Maine, forgot to add baking powder to her chocolate cake. However, the majority of evidence points to one place: The chefs at Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel, who designed this delightful dessert for the 1893 World Columbian Exposition.
The tale goes as follows: Bertha Palmer, wife of Palmer House Hotel owner Potter Palmer, was the president of the Ladies Board for Managers of the Exposition. When the event organizers asked her to create a special dessert for the boxed lunches at the Women’s Pavilion, Palmer turned to her hotel’s pastry chefs and tasked them with crafting a treat that would be more portable than a slice of pie and smaller than a layer cake, ideal for boxed lunches. The outcome was a brownie with double the usual chocolate, walnuts, and a signature apricot glaze that is still made at the hotel today (and you can recreate it for yourself by following this recipe).
There’s no proof that the Palmer House desserts were actually referred to as brownies, and it remains unclear who first coined the term. The earliest documented recipe for “brownies” appears in Fanny Farmer’s 1896 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, where she adjusted her cookie recipe to be baked in a rectangular pan. However, this version contained no chocolate—essentially, she had made what we now call a Blondie. Later, in the late 1890s, two advertisements surfaced referencing brownies. The first, from the 1897 Sears and Roebuck catalog, listed brownies under “Fancy Crackers, Biscuits [sic], Etc.,” with the possibility of them being either chocolate or molasses-based. The second, from the 1898 issue of the Kansas City Journal, advertised chocolate brownies, marking the first clear connection between chocolate and brownies.
The first recorded recipe for chocolate brownies—labeled Brownie’s Food—appeared in the 1899 Machias Cookbook, a community-sourced cookbook from Maine. It included chocolate, flour, milk, and baking soda, all the essentials for a brownie. Oddly, though, the contributor was from Wisconsin, and it remains a mystery how her recipe ended up in a Maine cookbook. Then, in 1904, The Club of Chicago published a cookbook with a recipe for Bangor Brownies. Bangor, like Machias, is a town in Maine, just 90 miles apart, which is an interesting coincidence. Finally, in 1906, Farmer released an updated version of her cookbook that included both a blondie and a brownie recipe, both named brownies. From there, the recipes spread across the country, and brownies eventually became a global phenomenon!
So, how did these treats get their name? Some theorize that they were named after the mythical creatures popularized in Palmer Cox’s 1887 book The Brownies: Their Book. However, there’s no definitive evidence to support this, and the true origin of the name may never be known.
Additional reporting by Austin Thompson.
