Saucepan Brownies

This, my friends, is a truly rare piece of paper. Battered and butter-stained it may be, but its scarcity value is almost incalculable. This practically one of a kind item is a recipe in my father's handwriting. Don't get me wrong, my dad is a really good cook when he chooses to be - he makes the best pancakes ever, and can cook pretty much anything on a grill. But he's never been a baking or recipe-book kind of guy. This recipe's provenance, then, is something special.

It originated, not with my father, but with my maternal grandmother. One of my mom's favorites when she was a kid, it was a recipe she would call home for once she had a kitchen of her own. One day over 25 years ago, my mom and her then-boyfriend drove down to my mom's hometown on a quest for all of her favorite childhood recipes. My grandma pulled out cookbooks and binders filled with handwritten notes, and my dad was set to work copying old recipes onto notecards in his distinctive lawyer's scribble.

I remember my mom making these brownies occasionally when I was younger, but I hadn't thought about them in ages. A fortuitous lack of groceries brought them back to my attention when I was home in the Twin Cities for a few days last week. My youngest sister is as ardent a chocoholic and as willing a taste-tester as a pastry chef could hope to find. So when I proposed making brownies after dinner one night she was flatteringly enthusiastic, and I set to work. I planned to use a brownie recipe I'd made and liked before, which called for both bittersweet chocolate and unsweetened cocoa powder and took about an hour to bake.

Alas, nowhere in our vast suburban cupboards was any cocoa powder to be found, and my lazy New Yorker self couldn't stomach the thought of having to get in a car and drive somewhere to procure some. While my dad was suggesting replacing the cocoa powder with anything chocolate he saw (hot cocoa mix, Toll House chocolate chips, Hershey's syrup), my mom pulled this recipe from an old brown binder.

As I soon discovered, this recipe alone was well worth the drive my parents took so long ago. It's simple (7 ingredients, which are probably in your kitchen right now), fast (35 minutes start to finish), and incredibly delicious. Straightforward and intensely chocolate-y, this is the archetype of the classic American brownie. Walnuts are optional - my family's split half and half on the issue, and so is the batch I made at home.

Here's the recipe as my dad copied it out, with my notes below.

2 squares chocolate = 2 oz. The original recipe calls for unsweetened chocolate; I was going with what we had at home so I used some unsweetened and some of a nice bittersweet Scharffen Berger that was left in our cupboard from my last visit home, so I decreased the sugar a little.

1/2 stick butter = 1/4 c. or 4 tbsp.

6x10 inch pans aren't quite as common as they used to be; I used an 8x8 inch glass pan and it worked out nicely

I didn't frost the brownies, but I'm sure that would be good too