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B. F. Gems
2 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup breakfast food 1 egg 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon melted butter.
Mix all together and add enough sweet milk to make a very soft batter. Bake in a quick oven in gem tins.
A plain muffin batter stretched with whatever cereal was left from breakfast. The vagueness of "breakfast food" is the only real puzzle, and the batter's looseness is what makes it work.
- What "breakfast food" meansIn 1913 this was a generic term for a packaged cereal — rolled oats, wheat flakes, granulated wheat meal — or the cooked porridge left over from the morning. Either reads sensibly here: use 1 cup of quick-cooking rolled oats, or 1 cup of cold cooked porridge. Dry flakes will drink far more milk than cooked cereal, which may be part of why the recipe gives no liquid quantity.
- Milk, by feel"Enough sweet milk to make a very soft batter" lands somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 cups depending on which cereal you used. Aim for a batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring — closer to thick porridge than to pancake batter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because soured milk and buttermilk were equally common in the pantry and would demand soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the closest match.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400–450°F; period terms were never precise. Gems depend on a hot oven to set the crust fast and drive the rise before the crumb firms; a moderate oven gives squat, tough results.
- Gem tinsHeavy cast-iron muffin pans, usually with rounded or oval cups. Grease them and heat them empty in the oven before the batter goes in — the sizzle is what produces the crisp shell gem tins were prized for. A standard muffin tin works, with slightly less crust.
- No sugarSugarless batters were normal for gems of this kind, which were a breakfast bread eaten with butter, jam or syrup. A tablespoon or two of sugar will not hurt them but will move them toward a modern muffin.
- Yield and timingAbout 12 standard gems, baked 15–20 minutes until well browned and springy. Best within an hour of coming out; oat gems go leaden by the next day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Keewatin, Ontario, and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households as advertising for Five Roses flour — recipes contributed by users of the brand, with the flour called for throughout. Gems belong to the North American family of quick breads that rose with chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century, and their name is often linked to the gem pan, a heavy cast-iron mould sold by stove and hardware makers by the 1870s, though which came first is not settled. Recipes like this one, folding "breakfast food" into the batter, reflect two things at once: the thrift of using up yesterday's porridge, and the newness of packaged cereal, which by 1913 had become an established grocery item that a cookbook could name without explanation. The initials in the title are almost certainly those of the contributor, a common way of crediting the home cooks whose recipes filled these promotional books.