The food writer who proposed that Fannie Farmer’s 1906 chocolate brownies came from reducing flour in a cookie recipe was Shirley Corriher. She presented the idea in her 2008 book BakeWise.
Corriher’s theory connects Farmer’s chocolate brownies with a chocolate cookie recipe in the 1896 edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Reducing the flour would make the mixture less cookie-like and more suitable for a dense, bar-shaped dessert.
The theory is plausible, but it is not settled history. Food writer Stella Parks suggested another possibility: Farmer may have encountered chocolate brownies during a 1905 visit to the Laconia Woman’s Club, whose 1904 cookbook contained a brownie recipe.
Farmer’s 1906 cookbook was especially influential because it circulated widely across the United States. Its chocolate version helped popularize brownies nationally, even though earlier recipes and competing origin stories already existed. Mildred Brown Schrumpf’s later “Bangor housewives” theory is another commonly cited explanation, not the source of Corriher’s proposal.