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Metropolitan Corn Gems
1/2 pt. sour Milk, 1 teaspoonful (even) The Great 1/2 cup Corn Meal, 2 tablespoonfuls Butter, 3 tablespoonfuls Sugar, 1 cup wheat Flour, "Arm & Hammer" Soda 2 Eggs, or Saleratus.
Beat together the cornmeal, sugar, butter and eggs. Then add the sour milk with the Soda (or Saleratus) dissolved in it, and the sifted wheat flour. Pour into deep gem tins, well greased and heated.
Bake in a hot oven.
A plain sour-milk cornbread batter baked in gem pans. The ingredient list was set in two columns in the original and reads as scrambled when run together; the coherent list is 1/2 pt sour milk, 1/2 cup cornmeal, 1 cup wheat flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 level teaspoon soda.
- Gem tinsGem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans with deep, rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, though it will not give the same crisp shell; if you have cast iron, use it.
- Heat the panThis is the instruction that matters. The greased pan goes into the oven empty until the fat shimmers, then the batter is poured into it hot. That initial blast of heat sets the outside and is the whole point of a gem.
- Half a pintOne cup. American pints were 16 fluid ounces in this period as now, so no adjustment is needed.
- Sour milkNaturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the closest modern equivalent, cup for cup. Pasteurised milk left on the counter does not sour, it spoils; if you use the vinegar-in-milk trick, expect a thinner batter and slightly less lift.
- SaleratusAn older name for the leavening the company was selling here: potassium or sodium bicarbonate, i.e. baking soda. A level teaspoon to a cup of sour milk is more soda than modern practice would use (usually about half that), so expect a pronounced lift and possibly a faint soda note; the soda is dissolved in the milk first so it reacts in the batter rather than in a dry pocket.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Gems want high heat and a short bake, 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are domed and browned and a tester comes out clean.
- Batter consistencyWith only half a cup of cornmeal to a cup of flour this is a soft, pourable batter, closer to a sweet muffin than to Southern cornbread. Mix only until combined once the soda milk goes in and get it into the pan promptly.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 gems. Best warm; like most soda-raised cornmeal breads they dry out by the next day.
This comes from one of the small recipe pamphlets that soda and baking powder companies distributed from the later nineteenth century onward, in which every formula conveniently calls for the brand on the cover. The double naming of the leavening, "Soda (or Saleratus)," is a period tell: saleratus was the older word for bicarbonate leavening, and manufacturers spent decades weaning cooks off it in print while selling them the same white powder. Sour milk recipes like this one belonged to households that kept a cow or bought unpasteurised milk, where a crock of naturally clabbered milk was a daily by-product rather than something bought on purpose, and the acid in it was what made soda work. "Gems" was the standard nineteenth-century American term for what would now be called muffins, and the cast-iron gem pans in which they were baked took their name from the cakes rather than the other way round; "Metropolitan" here is decoration rather than any documented link to a place.