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Breakfast Gems
3 eggs. 1 t sugar. 1 C milk. 1 C warm water 1 yeast cake (compressed) Flour to make stiff batter Beat yolk of eggs and add sugar, stir in milk, water and yeast. Beat well and set in a warm place to rise. When light, beat whites of eggs stiff and stir into batter with a pinch of salt. Bake in greased gem pans. If wanted for breakfast, mix batter the night before. Mrs. Elmer Huffman.
A yeast-raised breakfast batter baked in cast-iron gem pans. As printed, the ingredient list is incomplete — only water, yeast and flour are quantified, while the eggs, sugar and milk called for in the method were never set down — so this is a recipe to read and reconstruct rather than follow line by line.
- The missing quantitiesThe method uses egg yolks, sugar, milk and beaten whites, none of which appear in the ingredient list. Community cookbooks of this era were typeset from handwritten cards and dropped lines routinely. Any amounts you supply are your own guess; two or three eggs, a tablespoon or two of sugar and a cup of milk would be typical for a batter of this size, but the original does not say.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes were sold in more than one size; the familiar small cake is about 0.6 oz, and that size is usually reckoned as roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is still sold in some markets but keeps only a week or two refrigerated.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan with shallow oval or round cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. Grease it well and preheat it in the oven before filling; the hot iron is what gives gems their crisp shell. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, with a slightly softer crust.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was usual when ranges had no thermometers. A modern reconstruction would be a fairly hot oven, around 400-425F for 15-20 minutes, until browned and hollow-sounding; the book itself gives no guidance.
- "Stiff batter"The hinge of the recipe. This is a batter rather than a dough, but a stiff one: thick enough to hold a spoon mark and to drop from the spoon rather than pour. Add flour cautiously; too much and the yeast cannot lift it and the gems bake dense.
- The overnight riseMixing the night before assumes a cool kitchen. In a modern heated house, refrigerate the sponge overnight and let it come back to room temperature for an hour before folding in the whites and baking.
- Folding the whitesThe beaten whites go in after the batter has risen, and they are the only leavening added at that stage, though the yeast in the sponge is still working. Fold rather than stir, and bake without long delay so the air in the whites is not knocked out.
- YieldImpossible to state, since the milk and egg quantities are missing; a batter built on a cup of water plus milk would fill a dozen gem cups at least, and quite possibly more.
Gems were an American breakfast bread of the second half of the nineteenth century, associated with the cast-iron gem pan that a great many households owned, though whether the bread took its name from the pan or the pan from the bread is not settled. Gems of the period are generally thought to have been quick breads raised with baking powder or soda; this one is older in spirit, leavened with yeast and lightened with beaten egg whites, and it belongs to the tradition of overnight sponges set the night before so that hot bread could reach the table at breakfast without anyone rising at four to make it. Church and society cookbooks like this one were compiled from members' own cards and printed cheaply as fundraisers, which is why the contributor's name carries more weight on the page than the measurements do.