Let's write about Kathryn Hepburn's brownie recipe!

A dinner invitaiton  typically ends with, "What can I bring? 

My response is "What about a dessert?". And so, that is how I found the story behind the recipe for Kathryn Hepburn's brownies! They are divienly delicious! Many thanks to my dinner guests who introced me to this recipe published in Food News and Trends. Bon appetit!

Katharine Hepburn’s #1 Trick for the Best Brownies Is Totally Brilliant!

If you dig fudgy brownies, you have to try her foolproof recipe.
By Karla Walsh  Published on April 19, 2024

Countless Allrecipes community members—and the whole of our staff—are a little (okay, a lot) in love with brownies.

On a constant quest to take them to the next level, we have tested and perfected Mmm-Mmm Better Brownies. We’ve got the Best Brownies. And if this recipe could talk, it would say “Not so fast, I’m, Absolutely the Best Brownies.” We can’t forget Brooke's Best Bombshell Brownies and The Ultimate Brownies, either.

The competition for the ultimate, absolute best brownie of all time is stiff, so we’ll leave that up to you to decide which earns your trophy. 

But. before you make your final call, we have another contender to add to the mix after scouring the archives of the PBS project, The History Kitchen: Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies.

We’ll be dishing up the recipe below, but before we do, we have to take a moment to highlight the silver screen icon’s remarkably simple secret that makes her brownies—and honestly, any brownie recipe—better.

Katharine Hepburn's Trick for Better Brownies: In the 1980s, Hepburn was in a car accident. Her neighbor had heard about this and brought her a batch of brownies to sweeten her day as she recovered. According to The History Kitchen, as well as a story in The New York Times, she “was opinionated and brutally honest,” telling her neighbor that his brownies were not quite up to par. “Too much flour! And don't overbake them! They should be moist, not cakey,” she advised.

The biggest key of all, and one that lives on in the memory of the daughter of the neighbor (who was also close with Hepburn and wrote the story): “Don't put too much flour in your brownies.” Her other life advice? Never quit and be yourself.

Dialing in the just right amount of flour is key to yielding that beautifully rich, gooey, and fudgy texture. Add too much flour, and your brownies dry, crumbly, and might taste slightly stale.

Since it can be tough to measure flour correctly in cups, we’ve included a gram estimate in Hepburn’s brownie recipe below so you can employ a kitchen scale if you have one handy.

P.S. Prefer your brownies with no flour at all? Don’t miss our ultra-easy two-ingredient brownie recipe.

How to Make Katharine Hepburn’s Famous Brownie Recipe

In addition to her pro tips about the flour and not overbaking the brownies, Hepburn shared her own signature brownie recipe with her neighbor. 

After Hepburn passed away in 2003, the neighbor’s daughter later sent this tale, along with the recipe, to The Times as a letter to the editor in the actor’s memory.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup cocoa or 2 squares (2 ounces) unsweetened baker's chocolate
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup (30 grams) flour
• Pinch of salt
• 1 cup roughly chopped walnuts or pecans

Directions: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Butter an 8x8-inch baking pan, then set it aside.

In a heavy saucepan over medium-low heat, melt butter with the cocoa or chocolate, whisking constantly until blended.

Remove the pan from the heat, then stir in the sugar.
Whisk in eggs and vanilla, followed by the flour, salt, and nuts. Mix well.

Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. After the brownies are completely cool, use a knife to cut them into squares (employing a spatula to help loosen them from the pan, if necessary).

Enjoy while watching your favorite Katharine Hepburn movie.

Adapted from PBS.

Indeed they are amazing brownies!  Thanks to our dinner guests!

Let's write about an episode in the sport of boxing year 1936: Schmeling and Lewis New York City

Chapter 14, segment from "The Boys in the Boat", by Daniel James Brown.  An interesting report about boxing history during the rise of Nazi Germany. This particular segment from the wonderful history about the University of Washington's 1936, crew team's olympic gold medal victory, is a story unto itself. 

In the final days before the Poughkeepsie Regatta with University of Washington's crew team, another big sports story dominated the headlines on sports pages and sometimes on front pages areound the country- the story of a heavyweight boxing match.

Max Schmeling of Germany had been the hearvy-weight champion of the world from 1930 to 1932, and he was set on reclaiming the title from James Braddock.

Joe Lewis (May 13, 1914 – April 12, 1981) was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. Nicknamed "The Brown Bomber", ...

But, a twenty-two-year-old African American boxer from Detroit (he was born in Alabama) names Joe Louis, stood in Schmeling's way.

Louis had battled his way through twenty-seven professional matches with twenty-three  knockouts and no defeats to reach his current status as the number one challenger in the world.

In doing so, he had gradually begun to erode the racial attitudes of many- though far from all- white Americans. He was on his way, in fact, to becoming one of the first African Americans to be widely viewed as a hero by ordinary white Americans. Louis's rise to prominence had been so spectacular that few American sportswriters or bookies gave Schmeling much of a chance.

In Germany, though, the view was very different.  Although Schmeling was not a Nazi Party member, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi elite had enthuysiastically latched onto him and promised him as a symbol of German and Aryan supremacy.  The German press under the careful directonf of the minister of propaganda had made much of the umcoming fight.

Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic had an opinion about what would happen.  Even the crew tream's coaches in Poughkeepsie took time out to comment on the fight.  

"Schmeling might go four rounds," opined Al Ulbrickson*, Ky Ebright** was a blunter:  "Louis will murder him."

When the fight began, in a sold-out Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 19, 1936, (YouTube trailer here), Louis was at eight to one, the overwhelming favorite in New York. In Germany, though, interest in the fight was at a fever pitch, there was almost no betting on the fight. The odds were so low on Schmeling that few wanted to risk their cast, and no one wanted to be caught bettong on a black American.

In a small square of white light in the vast, dark void of the stadium, Louis stalked Schmeling around the ring like a predator for three rounds, lacing him with hard left jabs to the face.  It looked as if it would be a short evening. But, in the fourth round, out of nowhere, Schmeling landed a hard right to the temple that knowcked Louis to a sitting position on the floor. Louis took a count of two and then rose to his feet, covering his face and retreating until the bell sounded. Through the fifth round, Louis seemed dazed and ineffective. 

And then, at the end of the fifth, following the bell- which neither fighter heard over the crowd noise- Schmeling landed a particularly devastating right to the left side of Louis's head.  For the next six rounds,  Louis staggered about the ring, punished by a relentless barrage of rights to the jaw, somehow staying on his feet but scoring few if any points and inficting little damage on the German boxer.  Many in the overhwelmingly white crowd had by now turned suddenly and savagely against Louis.  "Delirious with joy," by the New York Times account, they screamed for Schmeling to end it.  Fiunally, in the twelfth, Schmeling went in for the kill.  With Louis now careening almost aimlessly around the ring, the German leaned into Louis's body and launched a rapid-fire flurry of hard rights to his head and fact, followed by one final cdrushing blow to the jaw.  Louis sank to his kneews, then toppled forward on his face.  Referee Arthur Donovan counted him out.  In the dressing room afterward, Louis said he couldn't remember anything about the fight beyond the fifth round.

That night in Harlem, grown men wee wept in the streets.  Younger men thres rocks at cars full of white fans returning from the boxing match.

In German American sections of New York, people danced in the street5s. In Berlin, Hitler wired his congratulatons to Schmeling and sent his wife flowers. 

Nevertheless, no one in Germany was happier with the evening's developments than Joseph Goebbles.  He had spent the night at his post summer house at Schwanenwerder, sitting with the fight on the radio, into the wee hours. He sent Schmeling a congratulatory telegram of his own.  "We are proud of you.  With best wishes and Heil Hitler."

Then, he ordered the state-controlled Reuters News Agency to issue a statement.  "Inexorably and not without justification, we demand Braddock shall defend the title on German soil."

The next day, still excited, Goebbels sat down and made an entry in his journal. "We were on tenterhooks the whole evening with Schmeling's wife. We told each other stories, laughed and cheered.  In round twelve, Schmeling knocked out the Negro. Fantastic. 

A dramatic, thrilling fight.  Schmeling fought for Germany and won.

The white man prevailed over the black, and the white man was German.  I didn't go to bed until five."

In the end, though, Jow Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would las all of two minutes and four seconds befoe his corner threw in the towel. Jow Louis would reighn as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1940, long after Joseph Goeggeles charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of his wife Magda and their children. (Joseph and Magda Goebbels had six children: Helga, 1932, Hilde, 1934, Helmut, 1935, Holde, 1937, Hedda, 1938, and Heide, 1940. Joseph Goebbels had many affairs during the marriage.The children, born between 1932-1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day both parents committed suicide.)

*Alvin M. Ulbrickson, Sr. (1903-1980) also known as Al Ulbrickson Sr., was an American rower and coach. After rowing as a student at the University of Washington, Ulbrickson went on to coach the crew there from 1927 until retiring in 1959.

**Carroll M. "Ky" Ebright (1894-1979) was a revered coach for the University of California, Berkeley crew.