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Date Gems
3 tbsp. butter (or substitute) 1 egg 1/4 cup condensed milk ¾ cup water 1 cup whole wheat flour 1 cup flour 1/2 teasp. salt 4 teasp. baking powder 1 cup Dromedary Dates (cut small) Cream butter substitute, add beaten eggs, milk and water. Sift in the flour, salt and baking powder. Beat well, stir in the dates, and pour into greased pans. Bake in a hot oven.
A whole-wheat date muffin from the era when "gems" meant small quick breads baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans. The method is straightforward; the two things worth pinning down are the oven and what kind of condensed milk is meant.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400 to 425F in modern terms, which is where period cookbooks generally placed a hot oven. Gems were baked hot and fast so the batter sets before the crumb dries out; figure 20 to 25 minutes in standard muffin cups, a few minutes less in small gem pans.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin tin with shallow oval or round cups. A modern 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use cast iron, grease it and heat it in the oven before filling so the batter hits hot metal.
- Condensed milkIn recipes of this period the term usually meant sweetened condensed milk, and since the recipe contains no sugar at all, that reading is the plausible one: the milk and the dates would be the only sweetening. Evaporated milk would give a nearly unsweetened bread.
- Water quantityThe "34 cup" should be read as 3/4 cup. With 2 cups of flour and only 1/4 cup of condensed milk the batter will be on the thick side, though the recipe itself says to pour it into the pans.
- "Butter (or substitute)"The substitute of the period was oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Any of the three works; butter gives the best flavour in so plain a batter.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is generous by current practice, and whole wheat does want a strong lift. If the finished gems taste faintly metallic, drop to three teaspoons next time.
- Cutting the datesChop them small and toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before stirring in. Whole dates sink and their sugars scorch against the pan.
- MixingThe recipe puts "beat well" after the flour has been sifted in. By modern practice, stirring only until the flour is moistened gives a more tender crumb; beaten hard at that stage the gems can come out tough and tunnelled.
- YieldAbout twelve gems. They stale quickly, as most whole-wheat quick breads do, and are best the day they are made.
Dromedary was the date brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, which packed and marketed Middle Eastern dates in cartons from the late nineteenth century onward and issued small recipe booklets to persuade American cooks that dates were an everyday baking ingredient rather than a holiday luxury. "Gems" is the older American term for what we now call muffins, taken from the cast-iron gem pan that sat in most nineteenth-century kitchens; by the 1920s the word was already receding. The whole-wheat flour and the absence of any sugar beyond the condensed milk place this squarely in the period's enthusiasm for "health" baking, when dates were promoted as a natural sweetener and a source of what advertising of the day liked to call food iron.