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Sweet-Milk Gems
Beat one egg well, add a pint new milk, a little salt, and Graham flour until it will drop off the spoon nicely; heat and butter the gem-pans before dropping in the dough; bake in a hot oven twenty minutes. Mrs. R. L. Partridge.
A four-ingredient batter bread with no leavening at all — the lift comes entirely from steam hitting screaming-hot iron. That makes the pan preparation, not the mixing, the part to get right.
- Preheat the pans, seriouslyThe gem pan goes into the oven empty until it is hot enough to make the butter hiss, and the batter is dropped in and returned immediately. Without that heat you get much less lift, and a denser whole-wheat gem.
- A pint of new milkTwo cups. "New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and unsoured — ordinary whole milk is the right substitute.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer crumb.
- How much flourNo quantity is given; you stop when the batter "will drop off the spoon nicely," meaning it falls in a thick ribbon rather than pouring or clinging. Expect very roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups for a pint of milk. Err on the slack side; a stiff batter will rise poorly.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F; period "hot oven" equivalents are approximate. A cooler oven tends to set the batter before the steam can expand it.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron pans with shallow oval or round cups, a close relative of the muffin tin. A cast-iron muffin pan is the direct equivalent; a light steel tin will not hold enough heat to do the job.
- Yield and timingAbout a dozen gems from a pint of milk. Twenty minutes is right at 425F; they are done when firm-topped and browned, and they are best eaten within minutes of leaving the oven.
- No sugar, no butter in the batterThese are not muffins in the current sense. Breads of this kind were commonly served hot and buttered at table.
Gems belong to the mid-nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for whole-grain breakfast breads, and the flour names the movement: Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose followers preached unsifted wheat flour as a moral as well as digestive good. Iron gem pans were widely advertised in the later nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period print many variations — sour-milk gems raised with saleratus, corn gems, rye gems — with the sweet-milk version, as here, relying on nothing but egg and steam. The attribution to Mrs. R. L. Partridge points to a cookbook compiled from contributed receipts, where a contributor's name stood as a kind of guarantee.