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GRAHAM GEMS FOR INVALIDS
Mix Graham flour with half milk and half water, add a little salt, beat, making the batter thin enough to pour; have the gem-pan very hot, grease it, fill as quickly as possible and return immediately to a hot oven; bake about thirty minutes. Practice will teach just the proper consistency of the batter, and the best temperature of the oven.
It will not be good unless well beaten.
A leavening-free batter bread that rises on steam alone, which is why the two instructions the original repeats — beat well, and get the pan searing hot — are the whole recipe.
- The hinge: heat the pan emptyThe gem pan must go into the oven dry and stay there until it is genuinely hot, then be greased, filled and returned in seconds. The initial blast of heat sets a crust and drives the steam that lifts the batter; a cold or warm pan gives flat, dense lumps.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, including bran and germ, and still sold under that name. Ordinary whole-wheat flour works, though it is milled finer and absorbs slightly more liquid.
- A gem panA heavy cast-iron pan of small cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. Cast iron holds heat far better than a thin aluminium or silicone tin, and the method depends on that stored heat. A cast-iron popover pan is the closest current equivalent.
- No quantities are givenBuckeye Cookery assumes you know the look of the batter. Start with about 1 cup Graham flour to 1 cup liquid (half milk, half water) and 1/4 teaspoon salt, and thin until it pours in a steady ribbon, roughly the body of heavy cream.
- "Hot oven"In period terms somewhere around 400 to 450F, though the original leaves it to judgement and says practice will teach the best temperature. There is no baking soda or powder here, so steam and the beaten-in air are doing the lifting.
- BeatingTwo or three minutes of hard beating, by hand or with a mixer, incorporates the air that steam will later expand. This is the one step the original insists on twice.
- TimingThirty minutes suits the deep cups of an old gem pan. In a standard muffin tin check at 20 minutes; they are done when firm, browned and hollow-sounding.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten gems from the quantities above. Eat them hot from the pan; with no fat or sugar they toughen on standing.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures urged coarse unsifted wheat, plain cooking and abstention from stimulants; by the time Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s, "Graham" had become a general grocery term for wholemeal rather than a badge of allegiance. Its place in the "Food For The Sick" chapter reflects the period's conviction that bran was mildly medicinal and that anything for a sick-room should be free of shortening, sugar and chemical leavening — a gem made only of flour, milk, water and salt was considered about as bland and digestible as baked goods got. Gem pans themselves were a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchens, cast in heavy iron by foundries alongside their skillets, and the technique of preheating the empty pan for a steam-risen batter survives essentially unchanged in the modern popover.</p>