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Corn Gems
⅓ cup butter. ½ cup brown sugar 1 egg ¾ cup cornmeal 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1½ teaspoon baking powder. 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, printed in the compressed style Five Roses used when it assumed the cook already knew how gems were mixed. Two things need saying before anything else: there is no liquid in the list, and the sugar is almost certainly a misprint.
- The missing liquidOne and a half cups of flour plus three-quarters of a cup of cornmeal cannot be brought together by one egg and half a cup of butter. A cup of milk or buttermilk is what a gem batter of this size would normally take. No liquid is listed at all, which looks like an omission in the printing rather than a technique. Add enough milk to give a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon.
- The sugarHalf a cup of brown and a full cup of white in a batter built on a cup and a half of flour would be extremely sweet for a gem. One reading is that the two sugar entries are alternatives rather than cumulative; about half a cup in total, or less if you want the corn to read, is the safer course.
- What a gem isA gem is a muffin baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan, whose deep oval cups were heated and greased before the batter went in. Any standard muffin tin works; preheating a cast-iron pan in the oven for five minutes before filling gives the crisp shell the name implies.
- OvenThe list gives no oven direction. A batter of this kind bakes well at 400 to 425F; expect 18 to 22 minutes in a standard muffin tin, less in shallow gem cups.
- CornmealPeriod cornmeal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket meal. Medium grind gives the texture the recipe expects; fine degerminated meal makes a smoother, blander gem. Some cooks scalded the meal in hot milk first to soften it, which is worth doing if your meal is coarse.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, milled by Lake of the Woods. Plain all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; it is not self-raising, hence the baking powder.
- MixingCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the egg, then add the dry ingredients and milk alternately and stop as soon as the flour disappears. Overworked gem batter bakes tough and tunnelled.
- YieldAbout a dozen standard muffins, or eight to ten in deep gem cups. Best eaten warm the day they are baked; cornmeal goes dry quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a milling company's premium, sold cheaply or given away to put the brand's name in Canadian kitchens, and much of its content came from housewives who submitted their own working recipes. That accounts for the telegraphic style here: a woman writing down what she already had by heart saw no reason to record the milk or the method, and the compilers printed it as received. Gems themselves were a nineteenth-century North American form associated with the heavy cast-iron gem pans that produced them, though whether the cakes took their name from the pans or the pans from the cakes is unsettled; cornmeal gems might be seen as a meeting point between American cornbread tradition and the muffin habit of English and Scottish baking. Whole sections of gems, scones and muffins in books of this period reflect how much quick, chemically leavened baking depended on the reliable commercial baking powder that had become cheap in the decades before the book appeared.