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Graham Gems
Take one quart of sweet milk. Stir in Graham flour until the batter is a little thicker than for griddle-cakes. Add salt. Bake in gem-pans in a quick oven. The gems are better if the batter is stirred up an hour before needed. The above will make gems as light as can be made with baking powder. If you wish them very nice, add one egg and a tablespoonful of sugar. Make the gem-pans very hot before the batter is put in.
A leaven-free quick bread that relies entirely on steam and a screaming-hot iron pan. Everything depends on the pan being properly preheated.
- Heat the pans firstThis is the hinge. Set the greased cast-iron gem pans in the oven while it preheats and pour the batter into them hot, working quickly. A cold pan gives dense, pale gems with no lift, because there is no chemical leavening to rescue them.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The steam has to form fast enough to inflate the batter before the crust sets.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron pans with shallow oval or round cups, a close relative of the modern muffin tin. A cast-iron muffin pan or popover pan works; a light nonstick tin will not hold enough heat to do the job.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; ordinary fine whole-wheat flour will work but gives a smoother, less nutty crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as distinguished from the sour or buttermilk that period recipes call for when soda is involved. Whole milk gives the best result here.
- Batter consistencyA little thicker than pancake batter means it should pour in a heavy ribbon, not drop in lumps. A quart of milk will take a considerable quantity of Graham flour, varying with the grind; add it gradually and stop when it pours sluggishly.
- The hour's restWorth doing. Bran absorbs liquid slowly, and a rested batter thickens noticeably and bakes lighter. Check the consistency again after resting and thin with a splash of milk if it has stiffened too far.
- SaltThe recipe gives no quantity. About a teaspoon for a quart of milk is in keeping with the period.
- Yield and timingA quart of milk makes a generous batch, roughly 18-24 gems depending on cup size. Bake 20-25 minutes, until browned and firm; serve hot, as they collapse and toughen as they cool.
Graham flour and the food reform movement behind it are traced to Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose 1830s campaign against refined white flour urged coarse, unbolted wheat on American households as a matter of health and moral discipline. By the end of the century his name had outlived his doctrine and simply meant whole-wheat: Graham bread, Graham crackers, Graham gems. The gem itself was a distinctly American form, defined by its pan, and the iron gem pan is often said to have been common in nineteenth-century kitchens. The interest of this particular recipe is its quiet boast that the gems will be "as light as can be made with baking powder" - a small argument that a properly handled batter and a properly heated pan could do without the commercial leaveners that had taken over American baking in the preceding decades.