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Rice Gems
Take two cups of sweet milk; one cup of sugar; one large cup of boiled rice; flour to thicken; one egg; two tab espoons of melted butter; one teaspoon of salt; three teaspoons of baking powder. Rub the butter and sugar to a cream, and add the beaten eggs, then the milk and then the rice and salt. Stir well, mixing thoroughly. Sift the powder with a little flour, add it to the mixture, and stir in more flour as needed to make a rather stiff batter. Bake thirty minutes in heated and oiled gem-pans. ENGLISH MUFFINS (SECOND METHOD)-These require one cup of milk; one and one-half cups of flour; two tablespoons of butter; one-half teaspoon of salt. Scald the milk, add the butter and set aside to cool. When lukewarm, add one-half of a yeast cake, salt and flour. Beat until light and smooth, cover and set away to rise. When very light bake in muffin-rings on a hot griddle, or in muffin-pans in the. oven, turning to both sides until a thin brown crust is formed. CRUMPETS-These require one cup of milk; one-half teaspoon of salt; one teaspoon of sugar; one-half yeast cake or one-half cup of yeast; one-fourth cup of melted butter; flour. Scald the milk and add to it the sugar and salt. When lukewarm, add the yeast and sufficient flour to make a rather stiff batter. Set in a warm place to rise for one-half hour, when the mixture should be light and spongy. Then stir in the melted butter. Have ready a heated griddle and a number of heated crumpet-rings. The English crumpet-rings are made of iron and are much larger than our muffin-rings, being about four inches in diameter. Large muffin-rings may be used. Grease them and lay them on the griddle. When hot, pour in sufficient batter to fill them to the depth of one-half inch. Place them in a moderate oven heat, so they will rise slowly. When the upper side is full of bubbles and slightly dried, turn the crumpets, rings and all, baking lightly on both sides. When done they should be partly torn open, buttered well, and set in the oven, or they may be toasted on either side and served very hot. Care should be taken that the batter is not too thin, else it will escape from under the rings. The heat in the pan and rings usually prevents this, however.
Three related recipes run together here: a quick-batter rice gem and two yeast-raised griddle breads. The gems are the only one with a stated bake time, and the flour quantity in all three is left to the cook's judgment.
- Gem-pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan, made in various sizes, commonly with six to twelve shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; preheat it in the oven and brush it with fat before filling, as directed, so the batter sets on contact.
- The flour is up to you"Flour to thicken" and "more flour as needed" mean roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups for the gems. Aim for a batter stiff enough to mound on a spoon rather than pour. Boiled rice varies enormously in wetness, which is why no figure is given.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated for the gems. Quick breads baked in preheated iron are generally given something in the 375-425F range, and a thirty-minute bake suggests the lower end of it. "A moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk also common in these books. Use whole milk.
- The riceUse cold cooked rice and break up the clumps with a fork before it goes in, or the gems bake with dense wet pockets. A "large cup" of boiled rice is perhaps 6 to 7 oz, depending on how firmly it is packed.
- A cup of sugarThat is a great deal of sugar for a bread-course gem and will brown the edges quickly. Half a cup gives something closer to a modern muffin's balance if the sweetness is not wanted.
- Half a yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes varied in size; the small ones then in general use were on the order of half an ounce or so, which would make half a cake roughly 1/4 to 1/3 oz fresh yeast — about a teaspoon of active dry or instant. The recipe also allows half a cup of liquid yeast instead. Rising times here assume a warm kitchen; judge by the batter, not the clock.
- Crumpet ringsThe 4-inch iron rings described are hard to find. Greased egg rings, tuna cans with both ends cut out, or 3 1/2-inch flan rings all serve. Keep the batter no more than half an inch deep so the bubble structure reaches the top.
- YieldNo yield is given. The gem batter should fill a standard 12-cup pan, possibly with a little over; the English muffin and crumpet mixtures will each give roughly half a dozen, depending on ring size.
Gems were an American institution built around a piece of hardware: the cast-iron gem pan, which manufacturers turned out in quantity through the second half of the nineteenth century and which held enough heat to give a small quick bread a crisp shell. Recipes for them are common in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, often as a way to work some cheaper or leftover material — cornmeal, graham flour, oatmeal, or in this case boiled rice — into a bread that could be mixed and on the table within the hour. Using up cooked rice this way was ordinary domestic economy rather than a regional specialty, though rice breads were most at home in the rice-growing South. The English muffins and crumpets that follow belong to an older, slower tradition of yeast-raised griddle breads baked inside rings, and the author's aside that English crumpet-rings are "much larger than our muffin-rings" indicates that the writer at least treated the two breads as distinct.