Bran Gems
1/2 cupful bran 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 tablespoonful whole wheat flour 1/2 cupful white flour 1/2 cupful milk 1 saltspoonful salt 1 egg 2 tablespoonfuls molasses 1 teaspoonful baking powder Mix Crisco thoroughly with molasses, add egg well beaten, milk, salt, bran, flours, and baking powder. Divide into well greased gem pans, and bake in hot oven from eight to ten minutes. These gems are excellent for constipation. Sufficient for eight gems.
A small-batch quick bread from a Crisco promotional cookbook, sized for eight gems and mixed in a single bowl. Nothing here is difficult, but the pan, the oven and the timing all assume equipment most kitchens no longer have.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of small, deep, rounded cups, traditionally preheated and greased before the batter goes in. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; fill eight cups and leave the rest empty, or add a little water to them.
- Hot ovenPeriod usage varies, but "hot" generally corresponds to somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Preheat fully, and preheat the pan too if it is cast iron.
- TimingEight to ten minutes suits a screaming-hot iron gem pan. In a room-temperature steel muffin tin expect 12-15 minutes at 425F; test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- BranThis means plain unprocessed wheat bran, the loose flaky kind sold for baking, not bran cereal. Cereal flakes are sweetened and pre-cooked and will not behave the same way.
- CriscoCrisco at this date was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and was probably firmer and more waxy than the current product. Any solid vegetable shortening will do; butter can be used, bearing in mind it brings water and salt with it. Cream it with the molasses as directed so it disperses rather than melting into streaks.
- The single tablespoon of whole wheat flourWhether it is deliberate or a slip in the printing cannot be told from the page; either way it is not structurally important. Folding it into the white flour is fine.
- Batter consistencyWith half a cup of milk against a cup of dry matter this is a loose, pourable batter. Let it stand two or three minutes so the bran hydrates, then get it into the oven promptly — the baking powder is the only lift it has.
- YieldEight small gems, best eaten warm the day they are made.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, whose introduction is variously dated to 1911, when production began, and 1912, when it was marketed nationally, as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening; that is why an otherwise ordinary bran muffin specifies the brand by name rather than simply calling for fat. "Gem" was the standard American term for a small quick bread baked in an individual cup, and the heavy cast-iron gem pan was a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchens long before the pressed-steel muffin tin displaced it. The line about constipation is equally of its moment: bran had moved from livestock feed and cheap brown bread into the era's health writing, promoted by sanitarium diet reformers and later by the breakfast cereal trade, and cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s are often said to have attached a therapeutic note to any recipe containing it. The molasses does double duty, sweetening a coarse batter and reinforcing the same claim.