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Honey-Gems
2 quarts flour, 3 tablespoonfuls melted lard, 3/4 pint honey, 1/2 pint of molasses, 4 heapbrown sugar, 11/2 level tablespoonfuls soda, 1 level teaspoonful salt, 1-3 pint water, 1/2 teaspoonful extract vanilla.
A large batch formula from the honey chapter, given as a list of proportions in the manner of the period. The quantities are bulk-scale and the dough is stiff, so the first job is scaling and reading the old liquid measures correctly.
- The measures in cups2 quarts of flour is 8 cups, roughly 2 pounds. Three-quarters of a pint of honey is 1 1/2 cups, half a pint of molasses is 1 cup, and one-third of a pint of water is two-thirds of a cup. Halving the whole thing gives a manageable domestic batch.
- The soda is doing real workA tablespoonful and a half of soda against 8 cups of flour looks extreme by modern habit, but honey and molasses are both acidic and there is no other leavening here. Cut it in proportion if you scale the batch down; do not increase it.
- What a gem isA gem in American cookery of this era is a small cake baked in a cast-iron gem pan, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan, well greased and preheated if it is iron, stands in for it.
- LardThree tablespoonfuls of melted lard for this much flour makes a lean, chewy crumb rather than a rich one. Leaf lard or a neutral shortening both work; butter will brown faster against the honey and molasses.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Honey and molasses batters scorch readily, so a moderate oven, 350F, is the safe reading, with small gems needing roughly 12 to 18 minutes depending on how deep the cups are.
- Mixing orderDissolve the soda in the water, warm the honey and molasses slightly so they pour and blend, then work the liquids into the dry ingredients and the melted lard last. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; overworking a soda dough this stiff toughens it.
- Yield and keepingAt full scale this makes something on the order of four to five dozen small gems. Honey and molasses are both hygroscopic, so they keep soft for several days in a tin and are generally better on the second day.
Honey occupies its own chapter here because in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was still a working household sweetener rather than a specialty item, often bought by the comb or the pail from a local keeper and used interchangeably with molasses in cakes, gems and gingerbreads. The pairing of the two in one recipe is characteristic: molasses supplied colour, acidity and cheapness, honey supplied perfume and a crumb that stayed moist. Gem pans, heavy cast-iron trays of shallow oval or round cups, were common equipment in American kitchens of the period, and a cookbook of this sort assumed one on the shelf without comment. The bulk quantities, two quarts of flour at a time, reflect a household that baked to fill a tin rather than to serve a single meal.