wholewheat-carob brownies

the natural foods cookbook (1961)

Over thirty years ago The New Yorker magazine published a cartoon by Carl Rose showing a small boy scowling at his mother over a plate of food. The caption read: “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.” The American language was thereby enriched with another trenchant idiom for calling a spade a spade. It also became a handy slogan for all those people who subscribe to the notion that healthful food is necessarily dull and unpalatable. Needless to say, I am not one of them. I believe that if cooking is approached as a creative art as well as a science, healthful food can be prepared in a variety of attractive, tasteful forms and still retain its nutritional values. — Beatrice Trum Hunter in the forward to The Natural Foods Cookbook.

I should have known this woman is not to be trusted if she can’t even explain a New Yorker cartoon. First, is that a boy? Maybe let’s use they/them pronouns to be on the safe side. Mom is encouraging Little Mx. to eat their broccoli, a new and exciting vegetable at the height of the Jazz Age (another story for another newsletter). Little Mx., like most children unswayed by the latest trends in foodie culture, clocks the greenery as no more satiating or palatable than the dreaded, everyday spinach. So, it’s not that the kid is just grossed out by the idea of eating their vegetables; they’re smart enough to know that innovation and fashion don’t equal flavor.

Beatrice Trum Hunter: teacher, farmer, natural foods cookbook author, got interested in health after a childhood suffering from rickets, a bone disease caused by a lack of Vitamin D. After reading 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (the Ketotarian of the 1930s) she changed her diet, cutting out sugar and other processed ingredients. She moved from Brooklyn to a rural New Hampshire farm with her husband, became the food editor of a magazine, and soon published her first book. BTH is the OG food media girlie. There should be a shrine in Alison Roman’s corner store.

The Natural Foods Cookbook, published a decade before Diet For A Small Planet and the rest of the counterculture tomes, has more in common with turn-of-the-20th-century Kelloggian asceticism than it does hippie-era indulgence. The book sold well, boasted over 2,000 recipes, and was dubbed, according to Hunter’s 2017 obituary in the New York Times, “the nation’s first healthful natural foods cookbook.”

But what to cook from it? None of these recipes are much in circulation today. The Times published a nice little round-up to accompany the obituary. Still, I wasn’t running to the kitchen to attempt “Escabeche of Flounder,” “German Apple Cake,” or “Baked Soybean Croquettes.” I scoured Amazon reviews for recommendations and came across a claim by Calvinist author (this should have been a warning) Doug Erlandson that “the whole wheat carob brownies (p. 302) are pretty good.”

Carob. Remember carob? I (barely) do. I vaguely recall eating little carob energy balls from the bulk bin of some natural food store when I was a kid. I don’t remember feeling positively or negatively about them, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t tasted the stuff since I was about 10. Jonathan Kauffman, author of Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat and one of the patron saints of this newsletter, wrote an article in the New Yorker 90 years after that broccoli cartoon came out called “How Carob Traumatized a Generation.” The generation he references immediately precedes my own: kids of older hippies born in the 1970s. Sidenote: when I posted these carob brownies on Instagram the other day, I got multiple visceral (grossed-out) reactions from my Gen-X friends. Carob does seem to have been traumatizing!

Kauffman recounts the journey of the carob tree arriving from Spain to similarly arid California in the mid-19th century. The carob pod was used mostly as animal feed and, by the 1940s, was relegated to “ornamental” status. Carob recipes (for humans) have popped up sporadically in health-food cookbooks since the 1920s. But after chocolate’s high-fat, caffeinated content became anathema to the more hard-core health-food devotées, carob became the de rigeur substitute for anything and everything that could, and should, have been made with cacao. By the 70s, Kauffman writes, “the natural-foods cookbooks filled with recipes: carob-chip-oatmeal cookies, carob puddings, hot carob cocoa, carob brownies, carob frosting, carob fudge. In food co-ops—trigger warning—carob-coated raisins became a bulk-bin staple. Even Häagen-Dazs, which débuted in Manhattan in 1976, stocked a short-lived carob-flavored ice cream.”

In their Spilled Milk podcast episode about carob, Molly Wizenberg and Matthew Amster-Burton note that carob’s window of popularity was short. Chocolate became a fashionable indulgence in the early 80s. “Death by Chocolate” cake, created by Marcel Desaulniers of The Trellis in Williamsburg, VA, in 1982, was soon copied all over the country. That same year, Sandra Boynton published Chocolate: The Consuming Passion, a popular “humor” paperback that graced every young couple's coffee tables or bathroom book racks (including my parents) in America. By the end of the decade, around when I encountered carob, it was relegated to the dustiest back shelves in the least fashionable health-food stores. By the beginning of the 21st century, it was all but extinct.

So I went into making Beatrice Trum-Hunter’s wholewheat-carob brownies with an open mind. Carob was a pop culture moment, like the rise and fall of Leif Garrett and the Iran hostage crisis, that I was aware of but just missed experiencing firsthand. I ordered carob and soynuts online and already had all the other ingredients at home. I used Trader Joe’s unfiltered honey, King Arthur whole wheat flour, and a mix of avocado and olive oils. I baked them as written, at 350 for 30 minutes, daydreaming as they sat in the oven. Maybe the brownies would be amazing and I would kick off a carob resurgence, reclaiming the good name of an unjustly maligned ingredient. Carob would become the new It ingredient, gracing viral Tiktok recipes and Erewhon smoothies. Even if I didn’t get full credit (trailblazers rarely do), I could sleep at night knowing I was a revolutionary.

The brownies came out like this.

You can see the edges separating from the pan. That means it’s overcooked. The taste wasn’t bad, just bland, but the texture (dry, chalky, hard to choke down) was horrible. Truly not something I would serve my worst enemy, though I let my husband taste it. I had no idea if the carob was even a problem. I could barely make it out, though I detected a warm, fruity sweetness not unlike a date. The major culprit was the amount of flour. 2 cups of whole wheat flour will produce a brick, no matter how much other stuff (fat, sugar, chocolate, carob) you fold into the batter.

I posted the disaster on Instagram and got lots of messages confirming that carob is irredeemable, a symbol of narcissistic, misguided hippies ruining their kids’ lives. The endlessly overlooked “latchkey” generation is also apparently the poisoned “carob” generation. That a mild-tasting pod could become the source of this much GenX trauma, I didn’t quite buy. The flavor (faint as it was) of the carob was nice. It’s not chocolate, obviously, but why should it pretend to be?

The problem was the brownies themselves, not the carob. The next day, I decided to make a new batch, throwing away BTH’s dour recipe and starting again from scratch. I Googled “best brownie recipes,” and found two promising ones, by blog stalwart Love & Lemons and flour royalty King Arthur. Both recipes use way less flour than BTH, so I cut the 2 cups to a tidy 3/4, keeping the type of flour (whole wheat) and hoping for the best. I also wanted to play up the date-y, Mediterranean characteristics of the carob, so I amped up the amount of carob powder, added some chopped dates, and substituted sesame seeds and tahini for the soynuts. Carob, unlike chocolate, lacks any bitterness, so I stole the King Arthur idea of adding a teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. And the brownies needed to be sweeter, so I split the difference between BTH’s 1/2 cup of honey and Love & Lemons (2 cups — yikes!) sugar bomb.

The new batch came out like this.

Gooey, like brownies should be, with a warm, nutty flavor from the carob and tahini and just the right amount of bitterness from the espresso. This is a fantastic brownie, celebrating the carob on its own terms. I hope you make a batch. You’ll never badmouth carob again.

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REVOLUTIONARY carob sesame brownies

Ingredients: