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To Dry Corn (Flour Beat well and stir)
and flour. Beat well and stir in carefully the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth and the baking powder. Bake in greased gem pans in a moderate oven thirty minutes; serve hot. These, if carefully made, are delicious breakfast cakes.
What survives here is the tail end of a batter recipe — the opening lines, with the ingredients and their quantities, are missing, and the page heading ("To Dry Corn") belongs to a neighbouring entry. What remains is a set of instructions for baking gems, and it can be read usefully even though it cannot be followed literally.
- The text is a fragmentThe recipe begins mid-sentence at "and flour," so there are no measurements for liquid, fat, eggs, flour or baking powder. Anything cited as a quantity here would be invention; use a current gem or muffin recipe for proportions and read this page for its method.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron tray of shallow oval or round cups, a forerunner of the muffin tin. Period directions often call for the greased iron to be heated before the batter goes in, which sets a crisper shell than a modern muffin tin will give; this recipe says only that the pans be greased.
- A moderate ovenIn books of this period a moderate oven is usually taken to mean somewhere around 325-350F, though the equivalence is approximate and varied from writer to writer.
- Thirty minutes is longHalf an hour suits a coal range with an unsteady oven and a full pan of thick batter. In a calibrated oven at 350F, gems of ordinary muffin size are usually done in 18 to 22 minutes; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Folding the whites"Stir in carefully" is the hinge. The whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, and beating them through the batter collapses them. Cut and fold in thirds until no white streaks remain, then stop.
- Baking powder lastThe powder goes in at the very end, after which the batter should reach the oven promptly. Standing about lets the first, faster reaction spend itself before the heat arrives.
- Probable corn contentPossible corn content -- The page heading "To Dry Corn" belongs to an adjacent entry, so the proximity proves nothing about this batter; it is only possible that the missing ingredients included cornmeal or ground dried corn. Nothing in the surviving text says so.
Gems were the everyday breakfast bread of American households from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and the cast-iron gem pan — sold in ovals and rounds — was standard kitchen equipment for decades before the pressed-steel muffin tin displaced it. Dried sweet corn was a staple winter store, put up in late summer when the crop was cheap and abundant, and cookery writers routinely followed the drying directions with ways of using the result. Ground fine, dried corn stretched wheat flour and carried a concentrated sweetness that fresh kernels lose in cooking. The stiff-beaten whites are a period signature too, doing work that a cook today would leave largely to chemical leavening; recipes of the 1880s and 1890s often used both.