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Breakfast Gems
Mrs. Brown, One cup sweet milk, one and a half cups flour, one egg; one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon Cook's Friend baking powder; beaten together five minutes; bake in hot gem pans in a hot oven about fifteen minutes.
A plain pour batter, closer to a popover than a muffin, and it depends almost entirely on the pans being screaming hot when the batter goes in.
- Heat the pans firstGem pans are heavy cast-iron trays of shallow oval or round cups. Grease them and set them in the oven while it preheats; the batter should hiss when it hits the metal, which is what drives the quick rise and crisp shell.
- "A hot oven"425-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for gem-sized cups; check at twelve.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian baking powder brand whose name was in use in this period. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one.
- The salt is a misprint waiting to happenThe salt reads high -- A full teaspoon of salt in this quantity of batter is a lot to a modern palate; half a teaspoon may suit better.
- Beating five minutesLong hand-beating of this kind was usual in period batters and would have aerated them. With a modern powder, mix only until smooth; extended beating develops gluten and toughens the crumb.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk called for elsewhere in the book. Whole milk gives the best result here.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter or sugar, so these are lean and best eaten hot from the pan; they stale quickly.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve gems from a standard gem pan; modern muffin cups are larger, so expect fewer.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest Canadian charity cookbooks and the model for hundreds that followed. Recipes carry the contributor's name, as this one does, and the format was borrowed fairly directly from American fundraising books of the same decade. "Gems" were the standard North American name for small quick breads baked in heavy cast-iron gem pans, a fixture of the nineteenth-century stove; the pan's mass and preheating did much of the work that chemical leavening does now. The named brand of baking powder is a period marker in itself, from the years when packaged leaveners were new enough that cooks specified which one they trusted.