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Bran Gems
One-half cup wheat bran, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sour milk, 1 egg, 3 tbsp. molasses, 1/2 tsp. soda, little salt.
— Mrs. B. T. Northridge
A one-bowl quick bread of the plainest sort, written for a cook who already knew what a gem pan was and how hot her range ran. A few notes fill in what the recipe assumes.
- What a gem isGems are muffins baked in cast-iron gem pans — heavy shallow-cupped pans that were greased and preheated so the batter set the instant it hit the metal. An ordinary muffin tin works; heating it in the oven with a little fat before filling gets you closer to the original crust.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and a wood or coal range had no reliable gauge in any case. Bake at 400-425F, which is the range that suits a small molasses-and-bran batter: hot enough to lift it quickly, not so hot that the molasses scorches. Figure 15-20 minutes.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here meant milk soured naturally: clabbered, mildly acidic and thickened. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; ordinary milk soured with a teaspoon of vinegar is a thinner but workable stand-in. The half teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise both the milk and the molasses, and it is the only chemical leavening in the recipe.
- Wheat branThis is loose miller's bran, not bran cereal. Unprocessed wheat bran from the bulk aisle is the same thing. Let the batter stand five minutes so the bran hydrates, or the gems come out gritty.
- No fat, no sugarThere is no butter and no sugar beyond the three tablespoons of molasses. Expect a lean, slightly chewy, distinctly bran-flavoured gem rather than a modern muffin. Lean quick breads of this kind stale quickly and are best eaten hot.
- YieldThe quantities are tiny by modern habit — about six small gems, or four standard muffins. Doubling scales cleanly.
Bran gems belong to the long American enthusiasm for bran as a health food, which ran from the Graham movement of the 1830s through the breakfast-cereal boom at the turn of the century; by the time this book was compiled, bran was sold as a corrective to what reformers called the over-refined white-flour diet. "Gem" was the standard American name for a muffin baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan, a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchens and a term that is often said to have faded as pressed-steel muffin tins came into use. The recipe's form — a list of quantities, no method, no oven, and a contributor's name attached — is typical of a church or society cookbook like the Philathea, where the book's purpose was to collect what members already made rather than to instruct a beginner. Mrs. Northridge's neighbours would have needed nothing more.