Home › Breakfast › Delicious Graham and Wheat Gems
Delicious Graham and Wheat Gems
One quartgraham flour, one pint wheat flour, two teaspoonsfuls baking powder, half a cup sugar, butter the size of an egg, one quart sweet milk, two eggs, a little salt. Bake in hot gem pans.
A plain quick bread scaled for a large nineteenth-century household. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are by volume in vessels most kitchens no longer keep, and the leavening is light by modern standards.
- Translate the measuresA quart of graham flour is 4 cups, a pint of wheat flour 2 cups, so this is six cups of flour and four cups of milk. Butter the size of an egg is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Preheat the gem pansThis is the hinge. Cast-iron gem pans were greased and set in the oven until sizzling, then filled and returned at once; the hot metal sets the outside instantly and gives the crisp shell that distinguishes a gem from a soft muffin. Filling cold pans produces a pale, heavy result.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies hot pans, not an oven setting; gems of this type were baked in a quick oven, and about 400-425F suits them. They bake fast, 15 to 20 minutes, and are done when the tops are domed and firm.
- The leavening is thinTwo teaspoons of baking powder for six cups of flour is well below current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup. Period baking powders were also variable in strength. Expect dense gems unless you increase it.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because so many recipes of the era called for sour milk or buttermilk with soda. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour with the bran and germ retained. Stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest modern equivalent; it absorbs liquid slowly, so let the batter stand five minutes before filling the pans.
- YieldAround 28 to 32 gems. Halve everything for an ordinary household, or bake the full quantity in standard muffin tins.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures urged coarse unbolted wheat and plain living on an America he thought overfed on white bread and meat. By the time this book was printed his crusading edge had worn off and graham flour had settled into ordinary domestic use as simply the wholesome flour, mixed here two parts graham to one of white to keep the crumb light. "Gems" were the American name for quick breads baked in heavy cast-iron pans of deep cups, sold from mid-century onward and heated empty before filling; the stored heat of the pans gave a strong initial rise from steam, which may be part of why so many gem recipes look under-powered on paper. A batch like this one, mixed and baked in half an hour, was breakfast bread in households that no longer kept a nightly yeast sponge.