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Graham Gems
V 1 C graham flour, sifted 1 t soda 1 C sour milk 1 egg-well beaten ½ t salt Bake in gem pans 20 minutes. Makes 8 gems. 1 T sugar 3 T shortening Lillian Sutton.
A one-bowl quick bread from the era when every kitchen had a cast-iron gem pan and a crock of milk going sour on purpose. The ingredient list is scrambled by the original typesetting, so read it through before you start.
- The stray amountsThe salt reads half a teaspoon, as the printed page has it. The sugar and shortening printed after the baking instruction belong with the batter; mix them in with the other ingredients before filling the pans.
- Graham flourCoarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Modern whole-wheat flour is the closest match; stone-ground whole wheat is closer still in texture. It drinks more liquid than white flour, so the batter should be thick but pourable.
- Sour milkGenuinely soured raw milk, which no longer exists in a supermarket. Buttermilk is the standard substitute and gives the same acid to react with the soda. Sweet milk with a tablespoon of vinegar per cup works but tastes thinner.
- Soda, not baking powderThe full teaspoon of soda is calibrated to the acid in the sour milk. Do not substitute baking powder here, and get the batter into the pan promptly once the two meet.
- Gem pansA heavy cast-iron pan of small, deep, rounded cups, roughly the size of a modern mini-muffin to standard muffin cup. Grease it and heat it in the oven before the batter goes in; the hot metal is what gives gems their crisp shell.
- No oven temperature givenThe book assumes you know. Twenty minutes for a small gem suggests a hot oven; something in the region of 400 to 425F is a reasonable modern guess. Test with a skewer at 18 minutes.
- ShorteningIn church cookbooks of this period the word could mean lard, butter, or a mixture of the two; hydrogenated vegetable shortening became common only later. Melted butter is the easiest modern reading and improves the flavor of the bran.
- YieldEight gems, as stated, which is a small batch by modern standards. Doubling is straightforward; they stale fast and are meant to be eaten hot.
Graham flour and the gem pan both belong to the nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for whole-grain bread promoted by Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose name attached itself to unsifted wheat flour and, eventually, to the cracker. By the time a Libertyville church group collected recipes under a contributor's name, "graham gems" had long since shed any reforming zeal and become simply a fast, cheap, slightly nutty breakfast bread he of a cup of flour and whatever milk had turned overnight. The gem pan itself was a fixture of the cast-iron catalogs, and the instruction to bake in one needed no elaboration, because everyone reading it owned the pan.