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Rye Gems
1 2/3 cups rye flour 1 1/3 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup molasses 1 1/4 cups milk 2 eggs 3 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients, add molasses, milk, eggs well beaten, and butter. Bake in hot oven in buttered gem pans twenty-five minutes.
A straightforward quick bread batter, sweetened with molasses and split evenly between rye and wheat flour. The only real translation needed is the pan and the oven.
- Gem pansGems are muffins, and gem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; if you use cast iron, butter it, and note that many period cookbooks (though not this recipe) direct heating the pan before filling.
- Oven temperatureA hot oven in this period means 425-450F. Bake at 425F and check at 18 to 20 minutes rather than waiting the full twenty-five, since modern ovens hold heat more steadily than the ranges these were written for.
- "Flour" means white wheat flourWhere the list says simply flour, read all-purpose. The rye should be medium rye; light rye gives a paler, milder gem and dark or pumpernickel rye makes them heavy.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 3 cups of flour is generous but not wrong for a batter this heavy with rye, which forms only a weak gluten network to trap gas. Use double-acting powder and check the date on the tin.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate the rye. It also darkens the crumb, so judge doneness by a skewer rather than by colour.
- MixingBeat the eggs before they go in, as directed, then stir only until the dry flour disappears. Rye batters turn gummy when overworked.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins, or 18 small ones. Best eaten warm the day they are baked; rye quick breads stale quickly.
Gem is a nineteenth-century American name for what we now call a muffin, associated with the cast-iron gem pan; whether the food took its name from the pan or the reverse is not settled. The pans sat in the coal range and period cookbooks often direct preheating them so the batter set on contact. Cookbooks of the period ran long lists of them: graham gems, corn gems, rye gems, each a way of getting a coarse or secondary flour onto the breakfast table without the labour of a yeast dough. Rye was generally cheaper than wheat and familiar to households with German and Scandinavian roots, and molasses was a common everyday sweetener before refined sugar prices fell. Pairing the two in a chemically leavened batter gave a quick approximation of the dark, sweetened rye breads that would otherwise have needed a sponge and hours of rising.