I’ve led a relatively sheltered life – pretty much everything I know about drugs I’ve absorbed through movies, TV, and books. Watching a recent episode of Swingtown (in which they pulled out that old cliche, the pot brownie) got me thinking – why is it always brownies? Why not chocolate chip cookies? Or lasagna? Is there something special about brownies that complements (or masks) the taste of marijuana, or is it just lazy writing?
Well, you can’t just eat Marijuana, it isn’t as simple as just eating the bud. You need to extract the THC for your body to absorb it. THC is fat soluble so it is normally extracted into butter. So, you can make anything that requires butter in it. So that pretty much excludes Lasagna (but wouldn’t that be great… pot lasagna… yummy!).
As for why its brownies, and not cookies though? No idea, but I’ve only heard about brownies myself.
Brownies are easy to make, have controllable portions, and satisfy the chocolate cravings all at the same time. But I have seen recipes for all sorts of laced goodies.
Dude, when you’re jonesing and want that sweet sweet release, do you really want to be standing in the kitchen spooning out cookies?
Brownies are famous due to a happening in the early parts of the century when some socialite lady released a cookbook that happened to contain Marijuana Brownies. (She’d gotten the recipe from a friend and didn’t notice the fact.)*
Essentially, it’s a meme and it’s easy. If you see someone eating a brownie and acting weird, you know what’s up without the writers having to add in more expository info.
- If I recall Cecil’s article on the topic correctly
I read once that brownies are used because they are baked at a heat high enough to break down the marijuana’s very tough cell walls and release the THC.
I have a jealously guarded secret recipe handed down from my mom for “special” granola cookies. I make them sometimes for medicinal users who have a hard time keeping food down. They taste fabulous, have enough fiber and fruit in them to overcome opiate related constipation, and enough ginger to keep nauseated tummies from expelling them before any good can come of them. You could probably live off the darned things for quite a while if you had to. I expect that when legalization happens I will have a flourishing business concern…
Brownies are used because the heavy chocolate taste is supposed to mask the flavor of the weed, but I find it to be an unfortunate melding of flavors that doesn’t hold up well. Weed has a musky/musty flavor that is actually emphasized by too much chocolate and the flavor worsens over time. The major advantage is that brownies don’t show the special ingredients and are therefore pretty unobtrusive to have and consume–as opposed to say special Rice Krispy treats, which are one of the tastiest and simplest to make pot foods but are pretty unmistakeably “not quite right,” and don’t pass the cursory visual inspection what with being bright green and all.
No, as Hirka points out, all the THC is extracted from the plant with butter, under heat. I had a friend that used to make butter by the pound and store it in his freezer. All the leafy material is discarded before it goes in the oven.
I’ve never done it (not being a fan of the pot high, alas) but it was frequently used as a seasoning in pasghetti sauce by some of my acquaintances in the 80’s
I have no idea how or if boiling in tomato sauce will extract the target compound or if they were getting high because they expected to get high. They did claim it was quite tasty, however.
I used to do this, back in the (long-passed) days when I had garbage bags full of schwag sitting around.
The product is more properly “ghee” (purified butter.) THC is soluble in fat, and insoluble in water.
I always had lots of it to spare - and never once did I make brownies. I guess the closest I ever came to that was a chocolate génoise. More common baking was pound cake, or cookies.
More common than that was just stirring some into a regular recipe near the end of the cooking process - stir fry, curry, whatever. (High heat is actually destructive to THC, so this afforded more bhang for the buck.)
I also used to like to make hot cocoa, just starting with ghee, then adding powder ingredients, slowly stirring in cream, and a tiny little bit of chili. Yum.
Thanks to all. I think I knew that you couldn’t just eat it, but had no idea why.
My sheltered life will most likely continue for the forseeable future, but if and when legalization occurs, you can put me down for a box of those special granola cookies. 
Hashish Fudge, actually:
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
Cecil’s take: Alice B. Toklas brownies: the recipe!
Like Hirka and a few others already said, it’s because the THC can be extracted using butter.
Definitely not just brownies being made, although it is common. Chocolate truffles are too. Not like I would know anything about that. OK, maybe I bit one once in band camp or something, but I ummm, didn’t swallow!
And milk can be made to wash them down. Mmmmm.
The Girl Guides will be selling them door to door…
I once heard a story about pot peanut butter cups, which just sounds brilliant to me. You could put rat poison in peanut butter cups and they will still be delicious.
We’ve got a cousin who once put it in the stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey. Several of our elderly aunts and our Great-Grandmother ate the leftovers, claimed it was the best stuffing they’d ever had, and asked her for the recipe. She told them the one on the back of the Pepperidge Farm bag (circa 1977-ish), and claimed she added Parsley and doubled the butter. They all tried it, said it wasn’t as good as Cousin’s, but it was really good. Hell, the addition of butter alone would have improved that family recipe.
I didn’t partake, since I despise all forms of turkey stuffing, but I did get to watch The Midnight Special with a couple of old women that night. Grandma thought Freddy Mercury was a nice looking young man with a lovely voice, and Aunt B was afterwards known to sing “Scaramouche, scaramouche can you do the Fandango, hum, hum, hum, Bolt of lightening . . .” while hanging out the wash. 
I have a cookbook with about 40 recipes of all sorts of things made with pot- pot roast (no pun intended), spaghetti, all manner of baked goods, etc. I keep it in my kitcsh book collection, along with my holy bible and 1920’s child-rearing guides.
I’ve seen some recipes for many baked goods, usually a fat component in combination with a sweet component. They all featured a butter or oil infused with the “active ingredient”, very much like infusing herbs at a slow simmer in a clarified butter or olive oil. This was then used as an induction into the final food. It seems like this method was always recommended from these peculiar culinarians.