Ginger Gems
1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 3/4 cupful chopped preserved ginger 2 eggs 1 cupful milk 3 cupfuls flour 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add eggs well beaten. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together and add alternately with milk to first mixture. Now mix in ginger and divide mixture into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in hot oven twenty-five minutes.
Sufficient for sixteen gems.
A plain muffin batter carrying chopped preserved ginger. The method is the standard creaming sequence, so it behaves predictably in a modern kitchen once the pan and the oven are translated.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin pans with shallow, rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the yield of sixteen suggests cups a little smaller than today's, so fill twelve about three-quarters full and bake the rest in a second batch.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in period usage is generally read as somewhere around 400-425F. Muffins of this size may well be done before the twenty-five minutes given, so start testing with a skewer at about 18 minutes.
- CriscoCrisco was a firm, all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly, and 1/2 cup butter gives a better flavour with a slightly less tender crumb. "Criscoed and floured" pans simply means greased and floured.
- Preserved gingerThis means ginger root cooked in heavy syrup, sold today as stem ginger in jars. Drain and blot it before chopping, or the syrup clinging to the pieces will wet the batter. Crystallised ginger works but is drier and sweeter; reduce the sugar by a couple of tablespoons if you use it.
- MixingAdding dry and liquid alternately is the hinge here. Fold each addition in only until it disappears, and stop as soon as the last flour is incorporated. Beating a baking-powder batter smooth develops gluten and gives tough, tunnelled gems.
- FlourThe softer flours common in domestic baking of the period absorbed less liquid than much modern all-purpose. Expect a thick, dropping batter; if it is stiff enough to mound, add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Ginger distributionToss the chopped ginger with a spoonful of the measured flour before mixing it in. It is heavy and sticky and will otherwise settle to the bottoms of the cups.
- ServingSixteen small gems, best warm the day they are baked.
"Gem" was a standard American name through the second half of the nineteenth century for what we now call a muffin, and the name is often linked to the heavy cast-iron gem pans that produced them, though which came first is unclear; recipe books of the period list gems by the dozen -- graham gems, rice gems, corn gems. This one belongs to a particular moment in food publishing: A Calendar of Dinners was issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, and the recipes name the product in the ingredient list and again as a verb for greasing the pan. The preserved ginger points to the well-stocked grocer's shelf of the same years, when Chinese stem ginger in syrup arrived in squat stoneware jars and was treated as a small luxury, chopped into cakes and puddings rather than eaten on its own.