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Corn Meal Gems
¾ cup corn meal 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 cup flour ½ teaspoon salt 3 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ cup milk 1 tablespoon sugar 1 egg Mix and bake as Graham Muffins II.
A plain cornmeal muffin batter from the muffin-and-gem chapter, written in the shorthand of a book that expects you to have read the preceding pages. Baking directions are borrowed from Graham Muffins II: beat the egg, add milk and melted butter, stir into the sifted dry ingredients, and bake in greased gem pans.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan, usually with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the iron pan should be greased and heated before the batter goes in, which is where the crisp gem crust comes from.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; muffins and gems of this type bake at 400-425F for 20-25 minutes, until well risen and browned.
- The liquid is shortOne and a half cups of cornmeal plus a cup of flour will not hydrate on half a cup of milk; the result is a stiff paste rather than a batter. Comparable gem recipes of the period take about 1½ cups of milk, and the batter should drop thickly from the spoon.
- Baking powderThe printed figure is garbled ('3 3 teaspoons'); two and a half to three teaspoons is right for this much flour and meal. Period powders were generally single-acting, so sift thoroughly with the dry ingredients and bake without delay.
- Corn mealFine or medium yellow or white meal, not coarse polenta grind and not self-rising cornmeal mix. If your meal is coarse, scalding it with part of the milk and letting it stand ten minutes softens the grit.
- MixingStir only until the dry ingredients disappear. Overbeaten muffin batter develops gluten and bakes into tunnels and a tough crumb.
- YieldAbout 12 standard muffins. Best eaten hot; cornmeal quick breads stale quickly and are better split and toasted the next day.
Corn meal was the everyday American grain long before wheat flour became cheap and uniform, and by this book's period the two were routinely combined: the wheat gives lift and structure, the meal gives flavor and a sandy crumb. "Gem" was a common late nineteenth-century word for a small quick bread baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan, a fixture of the New England kitchen; gem and muffin were already being used loosely of much the same thing. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book's method, which sets out a handful of base procedures and then varies the ingredients against them, so a cook who had made Graham Muffins II needed no further instruction here.