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Breakfast Puffs
1 egg. 1 cup sweet milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar Five Roses flour to make drop batter.
A bare-bones formula of the sort that assumed the cook already knew what a gem batter looked like. The whole recipe hinges on the flour, which is not measured.
- Flour quantity"Flour to make drop batter" is genuinely unmeasured. Expect roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups for 1 cup of milk: the batter should fall thickly from a spoon and hold a soft mound, not pour.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which in books of this period are typically raised with soda alone.
- The leavening pairSoda plus cream of tartar at 1:2 is homemade baking powder. If you substitute commercial powder, roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons replaces both, though the exchange is approximate. The 1 teaspoon of soda here is generous for 1 cup of milk; a scant teaspoon avoids any soapy edge.
- Work fastCream of tartar is a fast-acting acid and starts releasing gas the moment it meets the wet milk. Sift the leaveners into the flour dry, combine at the last minute, and get the pans into a hot oven.
- OvenNo oven instruction of any kind is given. In modern practice small breads of this type are baked hot, around 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes, until well domed and browned.
- PansNo pan is specified. Small pan-baked breads of the period were commonly baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans, greased and often heated before the batter went in. A standard muffin tin works; heating it first still helps the rise.
- No egg, no sugarThese are plain breakfast breads, closer to a soda biscuit than a modern muffin. Eat them hot with butter; they stale within hours.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 in standard muffin cups.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as an advertisement for its flour, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, and it reads like it: contributors wrote down what they did, not what a stranger would need to know, which is why the flour here is simply "enough." The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is the older domestic route to a quick bread, predating reliable packaged baking powder and still trusted by cooks who had watched commercial powders vary in strength. "Gems" is the North American name for these small pan-baked breads, and the cast-iron gem pans they were baked in took their name from the bread; the terms gem, puff and muffin were used loosely and often interchangeably.