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Belfasts
1 cup buttermilk 1 egg nutmeg ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1½ cups graham flour ¾ cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt 1 cup seeded raisins (optional).
Bake in gem rings in moderate oven.
A terse buttermilk quick bread of the kind these milling-company books printed by the dozen. The gaps are as telling as the instructions: no fat, no sugar, no baking time, and one spice given without a quantity.
- Gem ringsGem pans are heavy cast-iron trays of shallow round or oval cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan works; grease it well and preheat it if it is cast iron, which is how the crisp gem crust was got.
- Moderate oven350-375F. Small gems this size are done in 18-22 minutes, when a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- Five Roses flourThe house brand of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, a hard-wheat white flour. Modern all-purpose is the direct substitute.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ returned. Stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; ordinary whole-wheat flour will do, with a slightly finer crumb.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda is leavened entirely by the acid in the buttermilk, so the batter starts working the moment it is mixed. Combine dry and wet at the last minute and get it into a hot oven.
- The unmeasured nutmegThe original simply lists "nutmeg" with no amount. A quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, sits properly alongside the half teaspoon of cinnamon.
- A stiff batterOne cup of buttermilk against two and a quarter cups of flour gives a thick, spoonable dough rather than a pourable batter, and graham flour drinks more liquid than white. A further two to four tablespoons of buttermilk is reasonable if it will not drop from the spoon.
- No fat, no sugarAs written these are plain and dense, sweetened only by the raisins. The recipe gives no serving instruction; butter at the table would go some way to making up the difference.
- YieldAbout 12 gems.
The Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour, with recipes solicited from the women who used it; the book's authority comes from that collective, domestic origin rather than from any single author. The name "Belfasts" is not explained in the book, and one can only guess that it points at the Irish soda-bread tradition, buttermilk and soda raising a coarse wholemeal dough without yeast, recast here as individual gems. Graham flour itself is named for Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer whose advocacy of unbolted wheat in the 1830s left his name on the flour, the cracker and the bread. Gems belong to the era of the cast-iron gem pan and the wood range: quick to mix, quick to bake, and meant to be eaten the same morning.