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Wheatmeal Gems
Put two and one-half breakfast cupfuls of fine, granulated wheat into a basin with one saltspoonful of salt, and stir in gradually one breakfast cupful of milk and one breakfast cupful of water. Beat the batter as long and as quickly as possible. Butter some iron gem-pans, make them very hot, and fill them quickly with the batter, beating it briskly several times during the turning; place them in a hot oven, and bake. Serve either hot or cold.
An unleavened batter bread that rises on steam alone, like a popover. Everything depends on the pans being blazing hot and the batter being full of beaten-in air.
- The hinge: heat the pans emptyButter the cast-iron gem pan and set it in the oven until the fat shimmers, then fill and return it at once. Batter poured into a lukewarm pan will simply set into dense little bricks, since there is no baking powder or soda anywhere in this recipe.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large handleless cup of roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as a standard 8 oz measuring cup and use the same cup throughout so the proportions hold.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. That is modest for this quantity of grain; a half teaspoon suits modern palates.
- "Fine, granulated wheat"This most likely means a finely milled whole wheat meal, coarser than white flour and finer than cracked wheat -- fine whole wheat flour or a fine farina-type wheat meal both work. If you use a coarse cracked wheat the liquid will not hydrate it in the time given and the gems will be gritty.
- BeatingThe instruction to beat as long and as quickly as possible is doing the work leavening would otherwise do. Two or three minutes of vigorous whisking, plus the beating between fillings, keeps the batter aerated and the flour in suspension so the last gem is not thicker than the first.
- Hot oven425 to 450F. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until well domed and firm at the sides; opening the oven early collapses them.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen gems from a standard twelve-cup pan. They are best split and buttered within the hour; cold, as the original allows, they are chewy and want jam or honey.
"Gems" were the American name for small batter breads baked in heavy cast-iron pans with rows of deep, rounded cups -- often regarded as a forerunner of the modern muffin tin, and sold under the name gem pan through the second half of the nineteenth century. The unleavened versions, made from whole or "granulated" wheat with nothing but milk, water and salt, were favourites of the health-reform cookery that followed Sylvester Graham's advocacy of unsifted whole wheat, and they appear in dietetic and invalid-cookery writing of the period. Gems are also said to have figured among the Waldorf's breakfast breads, which may suggest that the plain, wholemeal style had found a place in hotel service: a grand New York kitchen offering the same steam-risen wheat gem a farmhouse cook would have baked in the same iron pan.