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Fruit Gems
1 cup corn meal 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup Zante raisins 1/2 cup cream 1 teaspoon baking powder Cook the meal and salt in the milk for a few minutes. When cool add the baking powder, and beat thoroughly. Add the fruit and cream, and bake in well buttered muffin tins.
A cornmeal mush batter rather than a conventional muffin dough — there is no wheat flour and no egg, so the texture is soft and pudding-like at the center. Two details govern the result: how thick you cook the mush, and letting it cool before the baking powder goes in.
- "Gems" and gem pansA gem is broadly what we call a muffin, associated with the heavy cast-iron gem pan of shallow oval or round cups, though which name came first is not settled. Ordinary muffin tins work; preheating them with the butter in place gives a better crust, which is part of what the iron pans were prized for.
- Zante raisinsZante currants — the small dried grapes sold today as "currants," unrelated to fresh red or black currants. The recipe wants two textures of dried fruit; if you can only find one, use a full cup of it.
- Cook the meal to a mushOne cup cornmeal to one cup milk gives a very stiff porridge. Stir constantly over low heat for three to five minutes until it pulls from the side of the pan, and expect to loosen it with a few tablespoons more milk if it seizes up.
- Why it must coolBaking powder added to hot mush spends its lift in the bowl. Cool the mixture to just warm, then beat hard — the beating is the only aeration this batter gets, since there is no egg and no gluten.
- CreamHeavy or whipping cream, unwhipped. It is the fat in the recipe, standing in for the butter or oil a modern muffin would use, so a lighter cream will give a drier gem.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until set and browned at the edges; the crumb will stay moist and will not dome much.
- SaltA full teaspoon is assertive by modern taste for so small a batch. Half a teaspoon suits most palates, particularly with the sweetness of the fruit.
- Yield and servingAbout ten standard muffins. They are best hot from the pan with butter, and they go heavy and pasty once cold — reheat rather than serve at room temperature.
Cornmeal gems belong to a long American habit of stretching or replacing wheat flour with what the mill nearest to hand produced, and books of meatless cookery leaned on such batters twice over: they were cheap, and they made a filling bread course for a meal built without a joint of meat. The vocabulary is period-specific — "gem" for muffin was standard American usage through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, tied to the cast-iron gem pan sold by the same foundries that made griddles and waffle irons. Recipes of this type, where cornmeal is first cooked into mush and only then leavened and baked, are close cousins of spoonbread and of the older mush breads of the South, and they were promoted heavily during the wheat-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when meatless and wheatless cookery were published side by side.