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Graham Gems
tablespoonfuls sugar 7½ cups sifted flour 2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 2 One and one-half pint graham flour, 1/2 pint corn meal, 1 teaspoonful salt, two teaspoons of baking powder, one and onefourth pints milk. Sift together graham flour, corn meal, salt and powder. Add the milk, and mix into a moderately stiff batter. Half fill cold gem pans well greased. Bake in a solid hot oven ten or twelve minutes. 2 1/2 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar eggs 1/2 cup raisins or currants 1/2 teaspoonful salt Dissolve yeast and two tablespoonfuls sugar in lukewarm milk. Add three and one-quarter cups flour, to make sponge.
Beat until smooth, cover and let rise until light, in warm place, free from draft about one hour. Add butter and sugar creamed, eggs well beaten, raisins or currants, which have been floured, rest of flour, or enough to make a moderately soft dough, and salt. Turn on board, knead lightly, place in greased bowl.
Cover and set aside in warm place, until double in bulk, which should be in about two hours. Shape with hand into medium-sized round buns, place in wellgreased shallow pans about two inches apart. Cover and let rise again-about one hour, or until light.
Glaze with egg diluted with water.
With sharp knife cut a cross on top of each. Bake twenty minutes. Just before removing from oven, brush with sugar moistened with water. While hot, fill cross with plain frosting.
The page as printed has two recipes tangled together by the typesetter or the scanner: the graham gems (graham flour, corn meal, milk, baking powder) and a yeast-raised hot cross bun made with Fleischmann's yeast. Read the gem batter and the bun dough as separate formulas and neither will give you trouble.
- Sort the two recipes firstEverything from "One and one-half pint graham flour" through "Bake in a solid hot oven ten or twelve minutes" is the gems. The scattered yeast, milk, butter, sugar, eggs and currants, plus the long sponge-and-knead method, belong to the buns.
- Pints of dry goodsOld American cookbooks often measure flour and meal by liquid volume: 1 1/2 pints graham flour is 3 cups, 1/2 pint corn meal is 1 cup, and 1 1/4 pints milk is 2 1/2 cups. The recipe itself describes the result as a moderately stiff batter.
- Graham flourCoarse whole wheat flour, unsifted and including the bran and germ. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing; regular whole wheat flour works but bakes denser and less nutty.
- A solid hot ovenA hot oven, which in modern terms means somewhere around 425F, though the book gives no figure. Gems were baked fast and hot, and 2 teaspoons of baking powder to 4 cups of meal and flour is modest leavening by current standards.
- Cold gem pansGem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans. This recipe asks for them cold and well greased; other cookbooks of the period instead call for heating the pans first and dropping the batter into hot fat.
- YieldRoughly a dozen gems, depending on the size of the pan. Best eaten soon after baking, split and buttered; whole grain gems dry out fast.
- The buns, if you make themTwo cakes of Fleischmann's yeast correspond to roughly 2 packets (about 4 1/2 teaspoons) of modern active dry yeast, and the milk should be scalded then cooled to lukewarm before the yeast goes in. No oven temperature is given; bake in a moderately hot oven for the twenty minutes stated, then glaze and frost as written.
Graham flour belongs to the nineteenth-century American health-reform current associated with Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher who campaigned from the 1830s onward for coarse unsifted wheat and plain living. Gems -- small quick breads baked in heavy iron cups -- suited that flour, needing little fat, sugar or eggs, and "graham gems" turn up in many household manuals from the 1870s on as a virtuous breakfast bread. The corn meal here is a thrifty touch. That this recipe sits next to a branded Fleischmann's yeast formula for hot cross buns suggests how such books were assembled in the early twentieth century: older reform-era standbys reprinted alongside promotional recipes supplied by flour and yeast companies, sometimes running straight into one another on the page.