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Gluten Gems
Put two breakfast cupfuls of gluten into a basin, mix into it one egg, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, a saltspoonful of salt and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, and make it into a light paste with one pint of milk or water. Put the mixture into well buttered small tins; bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.
A plain gem batter built on gluten flour rather than ordinary wheat flour, of the sort kept on hand for invalid and diabetic diets. Two things need translating: what "gluten" meant on a 1900 grocer's shelf, and what a gem tin was.
- Gluten flour is not vital wheat glutenThe period product was a high-protein wheat flour with much of the starch washed out, roughly comparable to today's high-gluten bread flour. Modern vital wheat gluten is nearly pure protein and will produce something closer to rubber than a muffin; use bread flour if you want a recognizable result.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two of them is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 modern cups; if the batter looks thin, that is the recipe, not an error.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon.
- Gem tinsCast-iron gem pans with oval or round cups, somewhat smaller than a modern standard muffin cup. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; "well buttered" is not optional with a batter this lean in fat.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Thirty minutes suits deep gem cups, but in a standard muffin tin start checking at 20 minutes.
- Mix brieflyHigh-protein flour develops structure fast, so combine only until the dry disappears. Beaten batter gives tough, tunneled gems.
- A pint of liquidTwo cups of milk (two and a half if the pint is imperial) to about two to two and a half cups of flour gives a pourable batter, much looser than a modern muffin. Gluten flour drinks more liquid than all-purpose; hold back a few tablespoons and add as needed if using bread flour.
- YieldAbout a dozen gems in a standard tin, or 18 to 20 in small gem cups. Best eaten warm; they stale within hours.
Gluten flour had a specific medical purpose in the decades before insulin: with much of its starch removed, it was prescribed to diabetics as a bread flour that would supply less sugar to the blood. Firms sold gluten flour and gluten biscuits from the 1880s onward, and cookbooks of the period routinely carried a short section of gluten breads alongside the invalid cookery. The "gem" itself is an American term for a small quick bread baked in a heavy cast-iron gem pan, common from the middle of the nineteenth century.