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Egg Rolls
Two tea-cups sweet milk, two eggs, a little salt, three and a half scant cups of sifted flour. Bake in hot gem-pans. -Mrs. L. S. W.,. Jamestown, N. Y.
A four-ingredient batter bread that depends entirely on heat and steam, since there is no leavening in it at all. Everything rests on the pans being properly hot before the batter goes in.
- Hot pans firstSet the greased gem pans in the oven empty until they are thoroughly hot, then fill them and return them at once. With no baking powder or soda in the batter, the rise comes from steam hitting hot metal; cold pans give you dense little bricks.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem irons, a precursor of the modern muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan works, ideally cast iron.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, often reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though usage is inconsistent and the book does not define it. On that reckoning two tea-cups of milk is roughly 1 1/2 cups; expect to adjust the flour rather than the liquid.
- "Three and a half scant cups"Scant means level to just under, not heaped. With that much flour to that little milk you get a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one, which is why these are rolls and not popovers.
- Hot ovenThe recipe specifies hot pans rather than an oven setting; a hot oven of this period is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 425-450F. Bake until the tops are browned and the rolls have pulled away from the sides of the cups, roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- Sifted flourSift before measuring, as written. Nineteenth-century flour was coarser and lumpier than modern all-purpose, and here sifting is also the only aeration the batter gets.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen. Eat them hot from the pan with butter; without fat or sugar in the batter they turn dry and leathery within the hour.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, assembled from contributions sent in by named housekeepers across the country, which is why this one carries a Jamestown, New York, address rather than an author. Its breakfast chapter is thick with gem recipes, gem irons being heavy cast-iron pans of small cups. Unleavened batters like this one belong to an older tradition than the chemically raised muffin: the same principle as Yorkshire pudding or the popover, where a screaming-hot greased pan does the work that baking powder would later do. The name "egg rolls" presumably marks them out from other gems, the eggs being the only thing lifting them.