Historic Cooking: Remake of Butterscotch Brownies from 1973.

After the first batch of Butterscotch Brownies cooled, the texture was perfect but I decided that the flavor was so bland, and too sweet, that I really didn't want to eat any more, and I also didn't want to feed them to anyone else! I grew up making and eating the butterscotch brownie recipe in the _Betty Crocker Cooky Book_, which is a good one, so I decided to re-make the recipe with some changes to see if I could fix it.

I swapped out the 2/3 cup shortening for 1/2 cup salted butter and 1 tablespoon shortening, left out the 1/4 tsp. salt called for in the recipe, and used 2 tsp. vanilla instead of just 1. The re-worked recipe looked like this:

1/2 cup salted butter, softened
1 Tablespoon shortening, room temperature
2 cups dark brown sugar (scant)
2 eggs, well-beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cream
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup chopped nuts or chocolate chips (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine all ingredients in the above order. Grease an 8-inch square baking dish and scrape the batter in. Spread out to the corners and edges, and level as much as possible. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until the center is no longer liquid, but just barely set. Remove from oven and let cool in the pan, on a wire rack or a heat-resistant pad for 10 minutes. Loosen from the sides of the pan with a knife as needed, and cut into squares while still warm. Let cool completely before eating to ensure a chewy texture.

Historic Cooking: Butterscotch Brownies from 1973.

 So, in the intervening years since I have posted here, I have not been completely inactive in real life!  I am still researching California women's clothing, women's costume from other places and time periods, and Italian folk dress; I am also still researching and making historic recipes. One of the projects that I have been cooking for, is the Great Rare Books Bake-Off, which is an informal, friendly competition between the rare books departments of Penn State in the U.S. and Monash University in Australia, where they challenge each other (and their respective U.S. and Australian compatriots) to make the greatest number of historical recipes from their archives of antique cookbooks and recipe books.  

The staff of each university selects a group of historic recipes to introduce each year, and they post them on the competition website, https://sites.psu.edu/greatrarebooksbakeoff/ for everyone to see.  Then, the staff and students of each institution, as well as any other interested people around the world, choose recipes from either school's archive (each year's recipes are added to the collection and can be used in following years), make the recipe as written (as closely as possible), photograph the results, and post them to social media with the hashtags #thegreatrarebooksbakeoff, #bakemonash, and #bakepennstate.  The institution with the greatest number of entries in a given year, wins the competition for that year, which involves mainly bragging rights, and a commemorative vintage pie plate which is passed back and forth between the schools each year, as one or the other wins the bake-off.  It's really fun to see everyone's interpretation of the same set of recipes, and everyone's opinion of the recipe itself, and how they would change it for the future. This year I decided to make Butterscotch Brownies from Penn State's recipe collection: 

Butterscotch Brownies, first attempt.

Photo: Elizabeth Urbach

Butterscotch Brownies

2/3 cup shortening

2 c. brown sugar

2 eggs, well-beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

¾ cup chopped nuts

1 tsp. top milk or cream

1 ½ cup flour

2 tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. salt

Combine in above order.  Bake 30 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees.

--from _A Rare Book Cookbook_, published by Penn. State University, 1973.