Cream 1 cup of butter with 2 cups of brown sugar; add 4 beaten eggs, 1 teaspoonful of soda dissolved in 1 large cup of strong coffee, 1 cup of molasses, 4 cups of sifted flour, ½ teaspoonful each of nutmeg, allspice, cloves and mace, 2 teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar sifted with ½ cup of flour, 1 cup of raisins, ½ cup of currants and chopped citron. Mix well and fill buttered gem pans ½ full and bake until done. Then cover with chocolate icing.
A heavily spiced, molasses-and-fruit batter baked in small tins — closer to a spice cupcake than anything creamy, despite the name. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no yield, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow round or oval cups, the direct ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well, as this batter is sticky with molasses and sugar.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your stove. Bake at 350F. Much hotter and the molasses and brown sugar are apt to darken at the edges before the centres set.
- Timing"Bake until done" means roughly 20 to 25 minutes for standard muffin cups, until a skewer comes out clean. These are moist and will seem underbaked to the touch longer than a plain cake would.
- The leaveningSoda dissolved in coffee reacts with the molasses; the cream of tartar sifted into the reserved half cup of flour is the second lift. Get the batter into the pans and into the oven promptly — the reaction begins the moment everything is combined.
- CoffeeLet the strong coffee cool to lukewarm before dissolving the soda in it and adding it to the batter, or it will start cooking the beaten eggs. "1 large cup" is best read as a generous 8 ounces.
- Vague quantitiesThe citron is given no measure at all — half a cup, chopped fine, is in keeping with the raisins and currants. Candied citron is still sold at holiday baking counters; mixed candied peel is a reasonable substitute.
- YieldThe batter runs to about 4½ cups of flour and four eggs, which is a large batch: expect roughly 24 to 30 gems depending on the size of the cups. Fill only half full as directed, since these rise well.
- The icingNo chocolate icing recipe is given. Any simple confectioners' sugar and cocoa glaze suits them; a cooked ganache is too rich against the spice and dried fruit.
- The nameNothing in the method produces cream, and the method directs the batter into gem pans, as the page's own title 'english-gems' reflects. Treat 'English Cream' in the heading as the book's own inconsistency rather than a missing ingredient.
"Gems" was the standard American term through the second half of the nineteenth century for small quick breads and cakes baked in sectioned cast-iron pans, which had to be preheated and greased hard to release their contents. The spicing here — nutmeg, allspice, cloves and mace with molasses, raisins, currants and citron — is the vocabulary of English plum and spice cake, compressed into individual portions and lightened with soda and cream of tartar instead of the long-risen yeast an older fruit cake demanded. Coffee as a liquid in dark spice cakes is said to have appeared in period American baking; it deepens the colour and blunts the sweetness of the molasses without reading as coffee flavour. The date-a-day format of this book, assigning each dish to a nationality, produces national labels that are often loose — a recipe like this one is best understood as an American kitchen's idea of English baking rather than anything from an English cookbook.