Home › Date-Cocoanut › Date Gems
Date Gems
To half a cup of stoned, chopped dates add the wellbeaten yolk of one egg, a pinch of salt, half a pint of sweet milk, two scant cups of flour in which two teaspoons of baking-powder have been sifted, adding a tablespoon of oil or butter before beating in the whipped white of the egg. Bake for twenty minutes rather briskly.
A plain muffin batter carrying chopped dates, baked in the cast-iron gem pans that gave the recipe its name. The measurements are straightforward once the old volumes are converted.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow oval or round cups, preheated in the oven and greased just before the batter goes in. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use iron, heat it first so the batter sets on contact and the crust browns.
- Half a pint of sweet milkOne cup. "Sweet" simply distinguishes it from sour or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder — use ordinary whole milk.
- "Two scant cups"Scant means filled just below the rim, so roughly 1 3/4 cups. The batter should be thick enough to drop from a spoon rather than pour.
- "Rather briskly"A hot oven, around 400F (period usage for 'brisk' ranges roughly 375–425F). Twenty minutes at that heat suits gem-sized cups; test with a skewer at eighteen.
- Stoned datesStoned means pitted. Modern dessert dates are often moister and sweeter than the drier pressed dates commonly sold at the time; toss the chopped fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so the pieces do not sink or clump.
- The egg whiteThe whipped white goes in last. The recipe says to beat it in, though folding preserves more of the air. It adds some lift beyond the baking powder in a milk-heavy batter.
- Oil or butterOne tablespoon of fat for a dozen gems is lean by current standards, and low-fat quick breads stale quickly; best eaten warm the day they are baked.
- YieldAbout twelve gems, or ten if your muffin cups are on the large side.
Gems were the American breakfast quick bread of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, defined less by the batter than by the pan: heavy cast-iron gem pans, sold by the same foundries that made griddles and waffle irons, were often said to be preheated before the batter went in, producing a crisp shell around a soft crumb. They fell out of general use as lighter tinned muffin pans took over. The date here reflects a genuine shift in the American pantry rom Middle Eastern and North African ports through the late 1800s, and by the time California's Coachella Valley plantings came into bearing in the early twentieth century they were cheap enough to appear in everyday baking. A collection of fruit recipes putting them into a plain gem batter, alongside a date-cocoanut section, shows the new dried fruits turning up in ordinary home cooking.