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Graham Gems
Two cups graham flour, two cups sweet milk, two tablespoons melted butter, two tablespoons sugar, three and one half teaspoons baking powder, a little salt. Bake in hot gem pans in a quick oven.
A plain quick bread from the era when cast-iron gem pans sat on every stove. The batter is thin by modern muffin standards, which is correct.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan with shallow oval or round cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it well and heat it in the oven first, as the recipe intends.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. The hot pan plus high heat is what makes gems rise and crust rather than spread; figure on about 15 to 20 minutes.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground with the bran and germ left in. Modern whole-wheat flour is the closest substitute; anything labelled graham flour today is usually a slightly coarser grind of the same thing.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk gives the best result.
- The baking powderThree and a half teaspoons for two cups of flour is high by current standards. Modern double-acting powder is reliably strong, so around two and a half teaspoons of fresh powder should give comparable lift.
- Batter consistencyEqual volumes of flour and milk give a pourable batter, not a stiff one. Mix only until the flour is wet; overworking whole-wheat batter makes the gems tough.
- YieldAbout 12 gems. They are best within an hour of baking, as low-sugar whole-grain quick breads dry out fast.
Graham flour and the gems made from it carry the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat flour, cold water and plain living against the white bread of commercial bakers. By the time this book was printed, his crusade had faded into ordinary domestic practice: graham gems appear in breakfast chapters not as a health regimen but as a fast, cheap hot bread that could be mixed and baked while the coffee boiled. The recipe's reliance on baking powder rather than yeast places it in the long era of chemical leavening, which had made hot breakfast breads a daily possibility rather than a weekly baking-day project.