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Oatmeal Gems
1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 cup of butter and lard mixed, 1 cup of sour butter and lard mixed, 1 cup of sour milk, 1 teaspoon of soda, 2 eggs, 2 cups of oatmeal, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of raisins, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon each of nutmeg and ginger. Bake in gem pans. hour
A sweet, spiced oat muffin batter, printed with an obvious typesetting error and no oven temperature at all. A few decisions have to be made before you can bake it.
- The duplicated line"1 cup of butter and lard mixed, 1 cup of sour butter and lard mixed" -- looks like a compositor's slip: the fat line appears to have been set twice, the second time with "sour" carried over from the milk that follows. The simplest reading is 1 cup mixed butter and lard plus 1 cup sour milk. One cup of fat is still generous for four cups of dry ingredients and gives a rich, almost cookie-like crumb.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin, usually with eight or twelve deep oval or round cups. Any standard muffin tin works; grease it well and, if using cast iron, heat it in the oven before filling so the batter sets on contact.
- No temperature givenThe recipe names no oven at all. Around 400F for 20 to 25 minutes suits a batter of this kind. The stray word "hour" at the end is the tail of a line that did not set fully; what time it originally specified cannot be recovered, though a full hour would be far too long for gems this size.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means milk that has turned and clabbered, acidic enough to react with the teaspoon of soda. Buttermilk works cup for cup, as does sweet milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in; plain fresh milk gives the soda little to work against.
- OatmealIn American recipes of this period "oatmeal" usually means rolled oats rather than fine Scottish or Irish pinhead meal, though the word was not used consistently. Old-fashioned rolled oats are the safe choice; steel-cut oats will not soften in the time the gems take to bake.
- LardLard gives tenderness and a clean flavour and is worth seeking out; leaf lard is best. Equal parts butter and shortening is the usual substitution, or use all butter and accept a slightly firmer crumb.
- Mixing orderThe list gives none. Cream the fats with the sugar and honey, beat in the eggs, then alternate the sour milk with the combined dry ingredients and spices, folding in the raisins last. Stop as soon as the flour disappears.
- YieldAbout 18 standard muffins, or a dozen large gems. They keep two or three days in a tin and reheat well.
Gems were the everyday quick bread of the late nineteenth-century American kitchen, tied to a specific piece of equipment: the cast-iron gem pan, sold in dozens of patterns by stove and hardware firms and heated empty on the range or in the oven before the batter went in. What separates a gem from a modern muffin is mostly the pan and the vocabulary. The honey and the sour milk both point to a farm household using what it had, and the heavy hand with spice and raisins puts this closer to a cookie than to a breakfast bread.