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Graham Gems
1 cup of brown sugar ½ cup shortening 1 cup sour milk ½ cup Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt Graham flour to make stiff batter.
Bake in buttered gem tins in quick oven. 2 eggs
A typical early-twentieth-century ingredient list: no method beyond a sentence, no times, no yield. The quantities are workable once you know what the terms mean.
- Read the list carefullyThe two eggs are printed last, most likely an artefact of how the list was set or transcribed rather than an instruction to add them at the end. Cream the shortening and brown sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sour milk alternately with the sifted dry ingredients.
- Gem tinsA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow oval or round cups, preheated and greased so the batter sets on contact. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use cast iron, put it in the oven empty while it heats and butter it just before filling.
- Quick ovenGenerally taken as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat expect roughly 15 to 20 minutes for muffin-sized gems; test with a skewer rather than by clock alone, since brown sugar browns the tops early.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic and thick. Use buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Baking sodaHalf a teaspoon to a cup of sour milk is about the usual ratio for neutralising the acid; the batter will rise but stay dense and close-grained, which is what a graham gem is.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat with the bran and germ left in, closer to today's stone-ground whole wheat than to fine whole-wheat pastry flour. Five Roses flour was the miller's own white all-purpose; any all-purpose flour stands in for the half cup.
- "Stiff batter" is the one vague stepThe amount of graham flour is genuinely unspecified. Expect somewhere around 1½ to 2 cups: the batter should mound on a spoon and drop reluctantly, not pour. Graham flour absorbs liquid slowly, so let the mixed batter rest five minutes before judging it, and stop mixing as soon as the flour disappears.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 gems from a standard muffin tin. Best eaten warm the day they are baked; whole-wheat gems dry out quickly.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unbolted whole-meal wheat was morally and physically superior to the fine white flour then becoming widely available. His name outlived his arguments, attaching itself to a flour, a cracker and a whole family of homely baked goods. "Gems" were the North American term for small quick breads baked in heavy sectioned cast-iron pans, popular precisely because the preheated iron gave a crisp exterior without yeast or long waiting. That a graham recipe appears in a promotional cookbook issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose business was selling white flour, is telling: the half cup of Five Roses in an otherwise whole-wheat batter is both a structural aid and a small piece of brand placement. The recipes came largely from the home cooks who wrote in, which explains the compressed, assume-you-know-the-rest style of the instructions.