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Breakfast Gems
One egg, two tablespoons melted butter, one cup milk, two tablespoons sugar, two cups flour, two teaspoons baking powder. Bake in gem pans.
— Miss Jennie Titus
A plain muffin batter of the kind that filled a hundred community cookbooks. The recipe assumes you know what a gem pan is and how hot to get it, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Heat the pan firstPeriod cookbooks commonly directed that cast-iron gem pans be greased and heated in the oven before the batter went in, so the batter sets quickly on hot metal and forms a crisper shell. A cold muffin tin will give you a softer, paler result.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan, its cups generally smaller than a modern muffin cup. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; fill the cups no more than two-thirds and expect a slightly larger gem.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400 to 425F, for roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until risen and browned at the edges, suits a batter of this kind.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the low side by current standards, and turn-of-the-century powders varied in strength. Modern double-acting powder at this ratio gives a modest rise; a scant tablespoon is closer to today's convention if you want a domed top.
- FlourThe batter should pour thickly rather than mound; a spoonful of extra milk is fair if it seems stiff.
- MixingCombine wet and dry only until the flour disappears. Lumps are acceptable and preferable to the tough, tunnelled crumb you get from beating a chemically leavened batter smooth.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen. These are breakfast breads, meant to come to the table hot with butter, and they stale within a few hours.
Gems are generally associated with the gem pan, the heavy cast-iron plate of small deep cups that was standard equipment in nineteenth-century American kitchens; catalogues of the period list gem and muffin irons, and some early gems, particularly graham ones, were said to rely on the searing hot pan alone to raise them. By the time this book was compiled, baking powder had done away with that difficulty, and "gems" had come to mean any small quick bread baked in those pans, from graham and cornmeal versions to this plain white one. That it appears under a contributor's own name is typical of the church and community cookbook, in which recipes tended to be short.