Mrs. Brown, the first-nameless protagonist of playwright Chandos Fulton’s 1873 novelette, responds witheringly to the news that a friend’s daughter has wed a man of modest means. “It was a love-match, I suppose,” her friend Mrs. Campbell told her, and Mrs. Brown “did not deign a reply.”
As the plot of Fulton’s novel unfolds, Mrs. Brown meddles in her own daughter Adele’s romantic life, breaking off a would-be “love-match,” to fix Adele up with a wealthier suitor. Adele’s marriage to the moneyed fellow is an unhappy one, and a scandal breaks out when people incorrectly suspect Adele of having an affair with another man. It turns out that Adele was just lonely, and when Adele’s cold-but-wealthy husband Mr. Dick comes to understand this, he becomes an ideal husband on command. Adele Brown and her ambitious busybody mother both get a happy ending. The original love-match man who broke Adele’s heart due to Mrs. Brown’s scheming in Chapter Four is never mentioned again.
Mrs. Brown’s desire for Adele to marry a wealthy man is symbolized by a status-symbol that serves as the book’s title: “A Brown Stone Front.”
Newspapers in New York City had been advertising “brown stone front” buildings for sale and rent since the 1840s. Other cities followed suit, and a “brown stone front” remained an attractive selling point in real-estate for the better part of the following century.
What was originally a cheaper and easier-cut alternative to marble and limestone became synonymous with success in America.
According to Charles Lockwood in his 1972 book, “Bricks & Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783-1929 An Architectural & Social History“: “In the 1840s and early 1850s, New Yorkers and visitors to the city admired the ‘unostentatious magnificence’ and ‘refinement’ of its brownstone-front mansions and row houses, and within several years nearly all of New York’s large row houses were built with the fashionable brownstone front.”
While New York’s association with brownstone buildings remains famous to this day, the material was used throughout the eastern seaboard and in New Orleans. Quarries in Portland, Connecticut and Little Falls, New Jersey provided much of the material which can be found on buildings in Baltimore neighborhoods like Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill.
The somewhat awkward and particular name “brown stone front” refers to the fact that the soft stone served only as a façade, attached to the front of buildings made of brick.
When the sandstone known as “brownstone” is first cut, it has more of a pink color. The hematite iron ore quickly oxidizes and matures into the brown color which inspired 19th-century bakers to name a chocolate cake in honor of the coveted brownstone-veneered buildings.
What exactly defines this cake is a little vague. A dense, pound-cake-like texture is fairly common, although some recipes are more leavened. With the recipe I used, the cake was so heavy and dense that the icing was squished out from between the layers.
The filling is sometimes an egg-white icing like in my recipe. Some call for a filling of jelly or chopped nuts.
A caramel icing between layers is a popular version that makes sense aesthetically and flavor-wise. In the 1904 “Maryland Cook Book,” ‘Miss Page’ contributed a recipe entitled “Chocolate Cake (Brownstone Front).” That recipe states that the cake “may be filled with either a white filling or caramel—caramel preferred.” If I make a Brown Stone Front cake again, I will take the hint.
Cinnamon, cloves, raisins, and coffee are additions in various other recipes. Like many of the named cakes that made the rounds in the 1800s, Brown Stone Front Cake is more about the idea of a cake than about a specific expectation.
My recipe was contributed to “Choice Maryland Cookery” by Mrs. B. S. Dorsey, in 1902. Byron S. Dorsey was a prominent merchant of farm equipment in Mt. Airy, Carroll County near where “Choice Maryland Cookery” was published. His wife’s name was Martha, but all of the census and findagrave information I found about her is wildly conflicting.
Another research obstacle was figuring out what Mrs. Dorsey meant by “half cake of chocolate.” Luckily this one wasn’t a dead end. An 1896 cookbook from Seattle had a recipe that called for “1/2 cake of chocolate (1/4 lb).” A second source confirmed this standard, and so I used 1/4 pound of chocolate. Unexpected density aside, this was a pretty good cake and a little slice went a long way.
I had entertained the possibility that “Brown Stone Front” cake could be named more directly for Chandos Fulton’s novelette. It wouldn’t be unheard of. A decade or two after the Brown Stone Front Cake entered the scene, Owen Wister’s 1906 novel “Lady Baltimore” would create a craze for that titular cake.
This possibility was laid to rest when I looked into the cultural impact of Fulton’s story. It was panned by critics. In scathing Victorian language, the Brooklyn Review called the story “a pleasantish little outline sketch… illustrative of the rather trite subject of marrying for money… It involves no original studies either of character or society,” the review went on, and commenting on the forced and unromantic happy ending the reviewer said, “a defiance of the traditional moralities regarding the end of mercenary marriages… gives the book its one soupçon of originality.”
The Chicago Weekly Post was more forthright: “One had better pay 75¢ to avoid reading it, than the same sum in purchase of the book.”
Brown Stone Front cake was somewhat more enduring, if not as permanent a fixture as the buildings that the cake celebrates.
Recipe:
- 2 Cups sugar
- 1 Cup butter
- 1.5 Cups milk
- 6 eggs
- 4 Teaspoons baking powder
- .25 lb chocolate
“Two cups sugar, one cup butter, one cup milk, six eggs, four cups flour, four teaspoons of yeast powder or Royal baking powder. Mix half cake chocolate in a little hot water until perfectly smooth, stir in one and one-half cups of scalding milk. Beat yolks of two eggs, two cups sugar together, add one teaspoon of vanilla, pour on hot milk and chocolate and let cool, then mix. Use white iceing between layers.“
Recipe from “Choice Maryland Cookery“, Printed at the Caroll Record Office, 1902
