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Indian and Flour Gems
One cup sifted meal, three cups flour, three teaspoonfuls of baking powder, two and one half cups of sweet milk, three eggs, one half cup of sugar, three small tablespoons of melted butter, a little salt. Have gem pans very hot. These can be baked in bread tins if preferred.
A plain cornmeal muffin batter from the era when "gems" meant anything baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan. The original gives no oven temperature, since the cook was expected to judge her own range.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, not flour made from any other grain. Fine or medium yellow cornmeal suits the batter; coarse stone-ground meal will give a grittier crumb.
- Sweet milkFresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened batters. Because baking powder is doing the work here, do not substitute buttermilk without adjusting the leavening.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron pans with deep round or oval cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. Ordinary muffin tins work; the point of the original instruction is the heat, not the shape.
- Have the pans very hotThis is the hinge. The greased pans go into the hot oven empty, come out, are filled quickly, and go straight back. The batter is loose, and the initial blast of heat from the metal is what sets a crust and lifts the crumb.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. As a modern equivalent, roughly 425F for about 20 minutes in gem pans; in bread tins, around 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, tested with a skewer at the centre.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for four cups of dry ingredients is broadly in line with modern practice, if a little on the low side. Period baking powders were single-acting, so bake the batter promptly rather than letting it sit.
- Butter measure'Small tablespoons' means rather less than a level modern tablespoon; take it as about 3 tablespoons, a little under 1.5 oz, melted and cooled slightly so it does not cook the eggs when stirred in.
- YieldAbout 18 standard muffins, or two small loaf tins. They are best within an hour of baking; like most cornmeal batters they stale quickly.
"Gem" was an American baking term of the second half of the nineteenth century, tied to the cast-iron gem pan sold by foundries such as Griswold; the name is often said to have attached to the pan first and then to whatever came out of it. Recipes like this one combine cornmeal with wheat flour, a pairing that shows up constantly in breakfast chapters of the period, where speed mattered: a batter mixed and baked while the coffee boiled, served hot because it would not keep. The instruction to heat the pans first may well be a carry-over from hearth cooking, where preheated iron did the work an even oven now does.