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Wheaten Gems
Mix one tea-spoon baking powder and a little salt into one pint flour; add to the beaten yolks of two eggs one tea-cup sweet milk ; add to the beaten yolks of two eggs one tea-cup sweet milk or cream , a piece of butter (melted) half the size of an egg, the flour with baking-powder and salt mixed, and the well-beaten whites of the two eggs. Beat well, bake immediately in gem-pans in a hot oven, and take out and send to the table immediately. - Mrs. Gib Hillock,
A plain egg-leavened batter bread, closer to a popover than a modern muffin. The printed text repeats the phrase "add to the beaten yolks of two eggs one tea-cup sweet milk" — a typesetter's duplication, not a second addition of milk.
- Gem pansHeavy cast-iron pans with small oval or round cups, the direct ancestor of the muffin tin. They were meant to be heated in the oven and greased just before the batter went in; the hot metal is what gives gems their crisp shell. A cast-iron muffin pan does the same job.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-450F; the book gives no temperature and the term is approximate. Gems depend on a fast rise from steam and beaten egg white, so the heat must be up before the batter is mixed.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, about 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz. The batter should pour thickly rather than mound.
- One tea-cup milkA teacup in American books of this period runs about 3/4 cup, smaller than a coffee cup. Add enough that the batter drops readily from a spoon.
- Butter half the size of an eggAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons, melted and stirred in warm but not hot.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished in these books from buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk or cream both work as written.
- The hingeFold the beaten whites in last with as little stirring as the direction "beat well" implies, then get the batter into hot pans at once. The single teaspoon of baking powder is light by modern standards, and a good part of the lift comes from the egg white, which collapses if the batter stands.
- Time and yieldAbout 12–15 minutes, until well browned and firm. Expect 9–12 gems; the instruction to send them to the table immediately is not politeness, since they soften and deflate within minutes of leaving the oven.
"Gem" was a common American name in the nineteenth century for a small quick bread baked in an iron gem pan, a form of tin- and ironware sold widely enough that recipes could assume the reader owned one. Wheaten gems are the white-flour version, distinguished in these books from graham gems, rye gems and cornmeal gems. The reliance on beaten egg whites plus a modest teaspoon of baking powder marks the recipe as transitional: commercial baking powder had been available for a generation, but cooks trained on egg-leavened batters kept both methods in play. The Dixie Cook Book is largely a repackaging of Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, whose contributors were predominantly Midwestern; some entries are credited to a contributor by name, the community-cookbook habit that gave such volumes their authority.