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Graham Gems (No. 2)
2 eggs. 2 cups sour milk 1 tablespoon butter or lard Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon molasses 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 3 cups graham flour 1 cup Five Roses flour.
The book gives ingredients only, on the assumption that any cook of 1915 knew what to do with a gem pan. A few things need translating before it works in a modern kitchen.
- Method, since none is givenWhisk the dry ingredients together, rub or cut in the fat, stir in the sour milk and molasses, and get the batter into hot greased pans at once. Because both soda and cream of tartar are present, the leavening begins the moment the liquid goes in and will be spent within a few minutes of standing.
- The two buttersFat appears twice: one tablespoon of butter or lard in the list, then ⅓ cup at the end. One of the two is likely a printing error, though the page gives no way to tell which. One tablespoon of fat to four cups of flour gives a plain, slightly dry gem; ⅓ cup would give something closer to a muffin.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan with shallow rounded or oblong cups, preheated in the oven and greased just before filling, so the batter sets on contact. A modern muffin tin works but gives a softer crust; heating the tin first narrows the gap.
- Sour milkSour milk here means raw milk that has clabbered naturally, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the closest supermarket equivalent. Two cups of milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar will also do, though it is thinner and the crumb will be looser.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these work as homemade baking powder, though at equal measures there is more soda here than a tin of baking powder carried. The extra soda is there to neutralize the acid of the sour milk and the molasses; do not swap in commercial baking powder one-for-one without accounting for that acid, or the gems will taste sharp.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in, not a sweetened flour like graham cracker crumbs. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing on a shelf today. The single cup of white flour is there for lift, and is worth keeping.
- OvenNo oven or time is given. Gems of this kind were baked in fast heat, around 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes, so they rise before the crumb sets.
- YieldAround two dozen in a standard muffin tin, depending on cup size. They are best eaten warm.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance lecturer and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat, and whose followers gave the word to a flour, a cracker and eventually a whole style of plain baking. "Gems" were the North American name for the small quick breads baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans, and by the time the Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company they were standard breakfast fare in Canadian households. That the book prints a No. 1 and a No. 2 version, and that this one leans on sour milk, soda and cream of tartar rather than a tin of baking powder, is a fair picture of the transitional kitchen: home-mixed leavening alongside a brand-name white flour.