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Delicious Corn Gems and Muffins
1 pt. Buttermilk or sour Milk, ¼ cup soft Butter or Lard, 1 cup wheat Flour, 1 even teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1/4 cup Sugar, 1 teaspoonful Salt, 2 cups fine Cornmeal.
To the buttermilk or sour milk add the The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda (dissolved in lukewarm water). Separate the eggs, stir the yolks well with the sugar, soft butter or lard, add the milk, salt, and the cornmeal and wheat flour sifted together; then stir into this the beaten whites of the eggs. Bake in heated, greased gem molds in a quick oven.
A plain buttermilk cornbread batter leavened with soda alone, written for cast-iron gem pans. One ingredient went missing from the list, so read the method before you start.
- The eggs are not in the ingredient listThe method calls for yolks and beaten whites, but no quantity is given anywhere. Two eggs suits this volume of batter; three will make it lighter and more custardy.
- A pint of buttermilkTwo cups. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is acidic enough to react with the soda, so no adjustment is needed.
- Sour milk is not spoiled milkAt the time this meant raw milk that had clabbered naturally. Do not attempt it with modern pasteurized milk, which spoils rather than sours; use buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean roughly 400 to 450F. Gems want high heat so they spring in the pan rather than drying out slowly.
- Gem moldsHeavy cast-iron pans with rounded or oblong cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. Grease them and heat them empty in the oven before filling, as the recipe specifies; the hot metal is what gives gems their crust. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, preheated the same way.
- Fine cornmealFinely ground meal, not modern coarse stone-ground grits-style meal, and not self-rising cornmeal, which already carries leavening and salt.
- One even teaspoon of sodaLevel, not heaped. Dissolving it in a little warm water before it meets the buttermilk is worth doing; it prevents the metallic pockets you get from undispersed soda.
- Yield and timingAbout 12 to 15 gems, 15 to 20 minutes at that heat. Turn them out of the pan at once or the bottoms steam.
This comes from one of the small promotional booklets that Church & Dwight distributed to teach cooks to use bicarbonate of soda, and the branded phrasing in the ingredient list is the point of the pamphlet as much as the muffins are. Chemical leavening reshaped American quick breads in the second half of the nineteenth century: soda plus an acid liquid, usually sour milk or buttermilk left over from churning, gave bread that could be mixed and baked within the hour instead of waiting on yeast. "Gems" was a common name for these small hot breads, and they were baked in the heavy cast-iron gem pans widely sold at the time; which name came first is not clear. Cornmeal versions were common because meal was cheap and the pans conducted heat hard enough to crisp it. The recipe's use of separated and beaten egg whites suggests an aim at a lighter crumb than plain stirred cornbread gives.