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Made with Baking Powder (Quart of unsifted graham quart)
1 quart of unsifted graham. 1 quart of white flour. 4 spoonfuls of baking powder. 3 large cups of milk. 1 egg. Salt. 2 ounces of lard melted. Have the milk tepid and mix the lard and egg in it; the powder and small teaspoon of salt to be mixed in the flour. Stir all together and beat for 3 minutes. Have the iron gem pans hot; drop in round spoonfuls of the fritter-like batter and bake ten minutes.
As it is none of our business to decide which are the very best gems, here is another receipt to be tried when the sameness of the foregoing has become wearisome: 2 pounds of graham; 2 eggs; 4 teaspoonfuls of baking powder; 2 bas ing spoonfuls of syrup; small teaspoonful of salt; 1 1/2 pints of milk or water. Beat all to a stiff batter. Make the gem pans hot and grease them. Drop in spoonfuls. Bake in slow oven 15 minutes.
Two versions of graham gems — the plain wholemeal muffin of the American health-reform kitchen, baked in heavy cast-iron pans that are heated before the batter goes in. The hot, greased pan is the whole point: it sets the outside instantly and gives the gem its crust.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole-wheat flour, bran and all. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; supermarket "graham flour" where sold is essentially the same product. Note the instruction to leave it unsifted — the bran is meant to stay in.
- Measuring by the quartA quart of flour is 4 cups, so the first recipe is 4 cups graham plus 4 cups white flour, roughly 480 g and 500 g respectively. The second calls for 2 pounds of graham, about 7 cups. Weigh if you can; volume measures of coarse flour vary widely with how it is scooped.
- "Spoonfuls" of baking powderGenuinely ambiguous. The second recipe specifies teaspoonfuls, which may hint that the first means something larger, but there is no way to be certain. Four tablespoons across eight cups of flour works out to roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup — high but not impossible; four teaspoons would be very little for that quantity. Start at the low end and judge from there.
- Basting spoonfuls of syrup"Bas ing" is a typesetting break for basting. A basting spoon holds roughly 2 tablespoons, so about 1/4 cup of molasses or cane syrup in the second batch.
- Gem pansCast-iron pans with shallow oval or round cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A cast-iron muffin or popover pan works; a modern light tin pan will not, since it cannot be preheated to the same effect. Heat the pan in the oven, grease it, fill it and return it at once.
- Oven heatNeither recipe gives a temperature. Ten minutes suggests a fairly hot oven; 425-450F is a reasonable guess. 'Slow oven' in nineteenth-century usage is usually put at around 300-325F, which may well need longer than the fifteen minutes given — test with a skewer.
- Lard and milkTwo ounces of melted lard is 1/4 cup; butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly. Tepid milk keeps the lard from seizing back into flecks when it hits the batter.
- BeatingThree minutes of beating is what the recipe asks for; these are lean, barely sweetened batters. The recipe does not say why, and how much the beating contributes is guesswork.
- YieldThe first batch makes roughly 30 gems in standard muffin cups, the second about 24. Both are best hot from the pan; they stale within hours and were meant to be eaten at the meal they were baked for.
Graham gems belong to the long afterlife of Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance lecturer and dietary reformer whose name attached itself to unbolted wheat flour and everything made from it. By the time this book appeared, graham flour may well have drifted out of sectarian health circles and into ordinary American baking as a plain, cheap, wholesome breakfast bread — no sugar in the first version at all, and only a little syrup in the second. The gem pan itself, a slab of cast iron with shallow cups, was a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchens and is often credited with popularising the individual quick bread; the practice of heating the pan empty before filling it is often linked to the older tradition of baking on a hot griddle or in a heated iron. The author's aside — that it is none of our business to decide which gems are best, and here is a second receipt for when the first grows wearisome — is a fair picture of how such books worked, collecting variants rather than legislating between them.