Home › Biscuits and Muffins › Green Corn Gems
Green Corn Gems
2 cups green corn put through food chopper 1/4 cup milk, or 1/2 cup if corn is dry 2 eggs 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper To the corn add milk and well-beaten eggs; add flour, baking powder, salt and pepper which have been sifted together; mix well. Drop into hot greased gem pans. Bake in hot oven 20 to 25 minutes.
A savory corn muffin from the era when "green corn" meant fresh ears at the milk stage, not a color. The batter is thick and drops rather than pours.
- Green cornThis is fresh sweet corn cut from the cob while the kernels are still soft and milky. Two cups of kernels is roughly 3 to 4 medium ears. Frozen kernels, thawed and drained, are the closest substitute; canned corn is wetter and sweeter and will need the smaller quantity of milk.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked food chopper clamped to the table was the period's grinder. A few short pulses in a food processor does the same job — you want a coarse, broken mash with some texture left, not a puree.
- Milk quantityThe range from 1/4 to 1/2 cup is deliberate and depends entirely on how much liquid the corn gives up. Mix the corn, milk and eggs first, then add flour gradually and stop when the batter is thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F by the usual period reckoning; 425F is a reasonable modern setting. Gems were baked fast in a preheated pan so the outside sets before the crumb collapses.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow oval or round cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; grease it and heat it in the oven for a few minutes before filling for a better crust.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by modern practice but not unreasonable for a heavy, wet batter. A modern baking powder can be measured spoon for spoon in its place.
- FlourPeriod flours varied and were often softer than today's all-purpose. If the batter seems stiff, hold back the last few tablespoons of flour rather than adding more milk.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 gems. These are savory — salt and pepper, no sugar — and suit soup, chicken or ham. Best within an hour of baking; they turn dense as they cool.
"Gem" was the standard American name through the nineteenth century for a small quick bread baked in individual cast-iron cups, and gem pans were sold by the same foundries that made griddles and spiders. Green corn recipes cluster in late-summer chapters of American cookbooks because sweet corn at the milk stage keeps badly — the sugars convert to starch within a day or two of picking — so it was cooked immediately and in quantity, appearing as fritters, puddings, chowders and gems. This one names its leavening by brand and states the proportion precisely, a habit of the period's chemically leavened batters, which could take a wet, heavy addition like ground corn without yeast and without waiting.