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Sweet-Milk Gems
Beat one egg well, add a pint new milk, a little salt, and Graham flour until it will drop off the spoon nicely; heat and butter the gem-pans before dropping in the dough; bake in a hot oven twenty minutes. Mrs. R. L. Partridge.
A leaven-free quick bread that depends entirely on a screaming-hot, well-greased pan for its rise. Get that part right and the rest is forgiving.
- Preheat the pans — this is the whole recipePreheat the pans — There is no baking powder, soda or yeast here. The lift comes from the egg and from steam hitting hot metal, so the gem pans should be heated in the oven, buttered, filled and returned at once. Cold pans give dense, damp lumps.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans, commonly eight to twelve shallow oval or round cups. A heavy cast-iron muffin pan is the direct equivalent; a thin nonstick tin will not hold enough heat to do the job.
- "A hot oven"425–450°F. At twenty minutes the gems should be well browned and sound hollow; they will not be light if the oven is coasting at 375°F.
- New milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and soured. Use whole milk. A pint is 2 cups.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat flour including the bran and germ, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest match; a bag labelled "graham flour" today is much the same thing.
- Batter consistencyFlour is given by feel, not measure. Expect roughly 3 to 4 cups to bring 2 cups of milk and one egg to a batter that drops thickly from a spoon rather than pouring; add it gradually and stop when it drops cleanly. Mix only until combined and use it immediately.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen gems. They are meant to be eaten hot from the pan with butter; without leavening they do not keep well once cooled.
Gems were a fixture of nineteenth-century American breakfast tables, and their name belonged as much to the pan as to the bread — cast-iron "gem pans" were a standard piece of kitchen equipment, and recipes were written around whatever pan the household owned. The Graham flour signals the influence of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer whose advocacy of unsifted whole wheat flour in the 1830s and 1840s left a long mark on cookbooks like this one; unleavened whole-meal gems fit his objection to refined flour. Buckeye Cookery (1877, Ohio) prints a run of gem variations, each contributed by name, which is how these community compilations were assembled: a neighbour's working formula, set down in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what your own pans and stove would do.