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Egg Rolls
Two tea-cups sweet milk, two eggs, a little salt, three and a half scant cups of sifted flour. Bake in hot gem-pans. - Mrs. L. S. W., Jamestown, N. Y.
A four-ingredient steam-raised roll with no leavening at all — the lift comes entirely from a screaming-hot iron pan and the water in the batter turning to steam. Everything depends on that.
- Heat the pan, not just the ovenGrease the gem pans and put them in the oven empty until the fat shimmers, then pour in the batter and return them at once. Batter poured into a cold pan will set before it can rise and you get dense little bricks.
- "Hot" ovenRead this as 425–450F. A hot start is what drives the steam; drop to 375F for the last third of the baking if the tops are colouring faster than the centres set.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin. A heavy cast-iron muffin pan or popover pan is the right substitute; thin non-stick tins will not hold enough heat.
- Tea-cupsA tea-cup in books of this period is smaller than a modern measuring cup — often reckoned at about three-quarters of one, though usage varied from kitchen to kitchen. The proportion is what matters; judge by the mixture in front of you.
- "Scant cups of sifted flour"Sift first, then measure lightly, then take a little off the top. Much flour of this period was softer than modern all-purpose and may take up less liquid, so err toward less flour rather than more.
- No leavening is not a misprintThere is no soda, no baking powder, no yeast. Do not add any; chemical leavening turns this into an ordinary muffin.
- Don't open the doorReckon on something like 20-25 minutes, and leave them undisturbed; a batter relying on steam can fall if the oven is opened while it is still rising.
- Yield and servingEnough for roughly a standard twelve-cup pan, depending on the size of the gems. Serve hot from the oven with butter.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most late nineteenth-century compilation cookbooks, was built from contributions signed with initials and a town — here Jamestown, New York, a reminder that these "Dixie" collections borrowed freely from Northern and Midwestern household books and from the same pool of subscriber recipes. The dish belongs to the large family of American gem and batter breads made in cast-iron gem pans: a cook with a hot iron pan could raise bread with nothing but eggs, milk and steam, which mattered in a period when yeast meant hours of waiting. Recipes of this type appear under many names — gems, popovers, breakfast puffs, egg rolls — and the differences are often said to come down to the stiffness of the batter rather than any distinct tradition.