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Bran Gems
1 cup sterilized bran 1 cup graham flour 7/8 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 3 tablespoons melted butter Mix the bran, flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together. Add the milk to the dry ingredients. Mix well, and add the melted butter. Turn into buttered muffin pans, and bake in a hot oven twenty to thirty minutes.
A plain quick bread from the era when cast-iron gem pans sat in the oven while the batter was mixed. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the pan, the oven and the fact that the batter should be treated like muffin batter, not beaten smooth.
- Heat the pans firstGems were often baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans, greased and heated in the oven so the batter hit hot metal. This recipe simply says buttered muffin pans, but preheating a buttered tin for a few minutes gives a crisper bottom crust.
- A hot ovenIn period usage roughly 400 to 450F. At the upper end of that range these may be done nearer 15 to 20 minutes than the full thirty. Test with a skewer.
- Sterilized branBran sold loose was often heat-treated to kill insect eggs and to slow the rancidity of the germ oil. Any modern packaged wheat bran (miller's bran, not bran cereal flakes) is the equivalent. Buy it fresh and smell it; bran that smells like old paint or crayons is rancid.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground, with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary whole-wheat flour substitutes directly; the crumb will be slightly finer.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters cup plus two tablespoons. Bran absorbs liquid slowly, so the batter thickens noticeably if it stands; mix and pan it promptly, or let it rest ten minutes and judge whether it needs another spoonful of milk.
- Mix as little as possibleDespite the instruction to "mix well," stir only until no dry flour remains; overworked batter gives tough gems with a domed, cracked top.
- YieldAbout eight to ten standard muffins, or six generous ones. They are barely sweetened by modern standards, one tablespoon of sugar to two cups of dry ingredients, and are meant to be eaten hot with butter.
Gems are an American name, current from the mid-nineteenth century onward, for a small quick bread baked in a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow cups, a gem pan or gem iron. Bran versions belong to a particular strand of that tradition: the health-reform cookery associated with Sylvester Graham, whose name attached itself to coarse unbolted wheat flour, and later with the Battle Creek sanitarium kitchens that made bran a household word for regularity. By the time a book like this one appeared, bran had moved from the feed store to the breakfast table, and packaged "sterilized" bran was sold specifically for baking. Its presence in a meatless cookbook is telling: such books were addressed partly to vegetarians on principle and partly to households economizing on meat, and a bran gem answered both, being cheap, filling and freighted with the period's confidence that whole grains did a body good.