It seems there’s two parts to this story. In 1893, Bertha Palmer asked chefs at her husband’s hotel in Chicago to create an easy-to-eat dessert for the boxed lunches served in the Women’s Pavilion at the World Columbian Exposition. They came up with the brownie, though it seems they didn’t give it that name. Fanny Farmer is widely credited with publishing the first brownie recipe in The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook in the early 1900s, though there may have been an earlier one published, in 1899, in a community cookbook from Machias in Maine.