Dumpster Brownies

A Delicious Little Mystery

George Cukor and Katherine Hepburn

When I was growing up on Chrysanthemum Lane, a short, steep, dead-end street in one of many canyons of Los Angeles, our family had a special brownie recipe. Everyone who tasted those brownies always said they were the best they’d ever had—not only were they packed with chocolate, but they were super moist inside, a little fudge-y even. Our recipe was called Lil’s Brownies, but the thing was, we didn’t even know who Lil was because the woman who gave us the recipe wasn’t named Lil.

You see, back then, our just down-the-hill neighbor was a perfect looking woman named Laura, with silky brown hair in a flawless pageboy, thick gold earrings, and simple, elegant clothes. She was an interior designer who was married to an architect, an interesting though somewhat quiet man whose father was a well-known Italian Jewish composer, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Laura and Lorenzo had two sons, who were a few years younger than my brother, Danny, and me, and my brother would sometimes go to their house to play with them. That’s how he met Myrtle, Laura’s mother, who was a housekeeper for George Cukor, the Hollywood director famous for his stylish comedies and his sensitive work with women, especially Katherine Hepburn. (Laura actually grew up in the servant wing of George Cukor's estate—it must have been hard to be the maid's daughter, going to school at Beverly Hills High with all those privileged children.)

George Cukor never married—he was gay, of course—and depended on Myrtle for everything (even after she retired, he called her to pack his bags for him whenever he had to go on a trip). So Myrtle was much more than an ordinary housekeeper, and was used to entertaining the Hollywood legends in appropriate style. And how we kids at our end of Chrysanthemum Lane used to benefit from her superb skills! She baked the most wonderful treats, thin, elegant, Belgian lace cookies, lighter-than-air Angel cake, and best of all her brownies, incredibly rich, dense, and chocolate-y. My mother never did any baking, so when I heard from my brother that Myrtle in Laura’s kitchen, I’d sometimes run over to Laura’s house to watch her work her magic.

One day my brother got the smart idea of asking Myrtle for her brownie recipe and he came home with a page of neatly handwritten instructions for "Lil's Brownies." From then on, that was our go-to recipe for brownies that we thought were the best in the whole world. We always did wonder why they were called Lil’s Brownies and not Myrtle’s Brownies, but we just included that as part of our amusing story of how we got the recipe. And we kept on making the same brownies as the years passed by.

Eventually, we heard that Myrtle died alone in a nursing home of what was probably Alzheimer's disease. George Cukor died a few years later and left a substantial amount of money to Laura. What Laura did next really surprised everyone at our end of Chrysanthemum Lane. She divorced her husband Lorenzo, using the money she had inherited to buy him out of the house, and then she married a very different kind of man, Jack, a former police chief who loved vintage cars. Then Lorenzo surprised us even more when he married Tomi, a beautiful Japanese-American woman, who had lived across the street from him (and us) for many years, and who was 10 years older than him. All that, too, became part of the brownie story.

Gradually everyone who lived at our end of Chrysanthemum Lane moved away. As our parent’s generation got older, it seems they no longer wanted to walk up so many stairs to get up to their houses or be responsible for hillside property that was difficult to maintain. Only Laura stayed put. And after my parents moved up to Berkeley where I had already settled down, I left that place behind forever. But in my dreams I sometimes live on Chrysanthemum again, just my husband and me, in that beautiful mid-century modern house perched up on a hill overlooking the house where my little brother and I used to stand in the kitchen watching Myrtle bake for her family.

It was only after all this happened that I read an article in the 60th anniversary issue of Gourmet Magazine by well-known food writer Laurie Colwin, in which she described her ideal meal. For dessert, she said, she wanted brownies and she extolled the virtues of what she called “slumped” brownies, which to her meant “slightly undercooked but not quite runny in the center.” That sounded like Lil’s Brownies to me! Then she shared her own recipe for slumped brownies, about which she said:

“The best recipe I have for brownies comes from a friend who got it from a magazine article about Katherine Hepburn. It is, apparently, her family’s recipe. If there were no other reason to admire Katharine Hepburn, this pan of brownies would be enough to make you worship her.”

Ding, ding, ding! After I read the recipe itself, it quickly became clear to me that Myrtle had gotten her recipe from Katherine Hepburn herself because Katherine Hepburn often stayed on George Cukor’s estate and that Lil must be someone in Hepburn’s family. So that became the new story we told everyone who asked about our brownie recipe: that it came from my childhood neighbor’s mother Myrtle, who was once the housekeeper for Hollywood director George Cukor, at whose home Katherine Hepburn was often a guest, and where Hepburn shared her family recipe for brownies with Myrtle, who in turn gave the recipe to us, though we still have to confess that we don't know who Lil is.

Or at least this is how I think it all went. After all I moved away from Chrysanthemum Lane long ago and memories are as malleable as recipes.

Speaking of which, our family tinkered with original recipe, injecting more chocolate into the brownies for starters. Eventually we even stopped calling the recipe Lil’s Brownies because for a few years there, when Scharffen Berger had a chocolate factory right here in Berkeley, near our house, the artisan chocolate maker used to just chuck their less-than-perfect chocolate into their dumpster. My brother was into dumpster diving back then, so he would often bring us 5 or 10 pounds at a time of Scharffen Berger’s discarded chocolate, sometimes just poured unevenly and other times in need of re-tempering. Because there was so much of it we thought nothing of using it to cook with, and soon found that brownies made with dumpster chocolate were far superior than those made with ordinary cooking chocolate. So, the next generation in our family dubbed the brownie recipe “Dumpster Brownies.”

The recipe is real.

Dumpster Brownies

1. Melt the following in a saucepan:

• 2 1/2 – 3 ounces unsweetened Scharffen Berger chocolate retrieved from Scharffen Berger dumpster or any high-quality unsweetened chocolate

• 1 cube (1/4 lb) unsalted butter

2. Add the following and bring the mixture to a light simmer:

• 1 cup sugar

3. Remove chocolate mixture from the stove.

4. Beat the following together in a separate bowl.

• 2 eggs, beaten

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

5. Mix egg mixture into chocolate mixture.

6. Add the following to the chocolate-egg mixture, and best until glossy (1-2 minutes):

• 1/2 cup flour

• a pinch of salt

7. Pour brownie mixture into a buttered baking pan (8” round or smaller).

6. Bake brownies at 375 degrees for 13-15 minutes.

To increase the recipe size, change baking pan sizes as follows:

1 1/2 recipes in a 9 x9 or 11 x 7 inch pan

2 recipes in a 13 x 9 inch pan

3 recipes in a 15 x 10 inch pan

Enjoy!