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Gluten Gems
2 eggs. 1 cup milk. 1½ cups gluten flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Beat the yolks of the eggs; add the milk; then the flour and baking powder; beat well; stir in the whites and bake in hot buttered gem pans about twenty minutes.
A quick egg-leavened batter baked in cast-iron gem pans, from the era when "gluten flour" was sold as a reduced-starch flour for invalid and diabetic cookery. The finished gems are meant to be light and hollow-crumbed rather than cakey.
- Gluten flour is not vital wheat glutenThe commercial gluten flour of this period was a wheat flour with much of the starch washed out; protein content varied a good deal by brand, but it was far below that of modern vital wheat gluten, which runs around 75-80 percent. Used measure for measure, vital wheat gluten will bake into rubber; a strong bread flour, or bread flour with a spoonful or two of vital wheat gluten worked in, is the nearest usable stand-in.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron tray of shallow round or oval cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. The pan is greased and heated empty until the butter sizzles, then filled and returned to the oven at once; that initial blast of heat is what gives gems their crisp shell. A cast-iron muffin or popover pan behaves the same way.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; a 'hot' oven in period usage is usually rendered as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits gem-sized cups; take them out when the tops are firm and browned.
- Egg and milk quantitiesThe proportions of eggs and milk are not stated in the text as it stands. Gem batters of this type generally run to two eggs and about a cup of milk per one and a half cups of flour, giving a batter that pours rather than drops, but the original figures are not recoverable here.
- Folding, not stirringThe whites are beaten separately and are the main source of lift alongside the baking powder. Fold them in with a spatula in a few strokes; stirring them as the text says will knock out the air the gems depend on.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to one and a half cups of flour works out at two teaspoons per cup, heavier than modern practice, which runs about one to one and a quarter teaspoons per cup. With bread flour you can cut back to two teaspoons in total.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly eight to twelve gems, depending on the pan. They are best eaten hot from the oven, as the crust softens quickly and the high-protein crumb turns tough as it cools.
Gluten flour entered American cookbooks in the 1890s and 1900s as a diabetic and dyspeptic food, promoted at a time when diabetes could only be managed by diet, including some restriction of starch. Brands such as those sold by sanitarium bakeries and pharmacies were marketed alongside bran biscuits and unsweetened rusks, and cookbooks of the period often carried a small cluster of gluten breads, gems and muffins for invalid cookery. Gems themselves are older and quite separate from that: the name is generally traced to the ridged cast-iron pans that were common in American kitchens from the mid-nineteenth century, though the direction of the naming is not settled, and gem batters were made from wheat, graham and cornmeal alike. This recipe is the intersection of the two -- a familiar quick bread rebuilt around a specialty flour for a reader who had been told to avoid starch.