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Corn Breakfast Cakes (II)
Mrs. W. A. Carson.
One and one-half cups sweet milk, two of flour, one of corn meal, two eggs beaten light, butter size of an egg, tablespoon of Cook's Friend baking powder mixed in flour; bake in gem pans, and have them hot before putting in the mixture; cook quarter of an hour in a quick oven.
A plain gem batter, halfway between a muffin and a corn cake. The whole recipe hangs on one instruction: the pans must be blazing hot before the batter goes in, or the cakes will not lift and crisp.
- Heat the pans firstGem pans are heavy cast iron. Grease them and set them in the oven while it preheats, then pour the batter into the hot cups and return them at once. Batter poured into a cold pan gives flat, pale cakes with a tough crust.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400–450°F; period usage varies. At that heat a quarter of an hour is right for standard gem or muffin cups; check at 12 minutes.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter so it does not seize against the cold milk.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Do not substitute buttermilk here without adjusting the leavening.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period, still made. Any modern double-acting baking powder works; a full tablespoon for two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, and 2 teaspoons gives a cleaner flavour.
- Corn mealUse fine or medium yellow or white cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not the self-rising cornmeal sold in the American South, which already contains leavening and salt.
- SaltNone is listed. Half a teaspoon in the dry ingredients is worth adding.
- YieldRoughly a dozen standard gems. Fill each cup about two-thirds.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind — hundreds of signed contributions, Mrs. W. A. Carson's among them, gathered from subscribers across the country. Gem pans, the heavy cast-iron trays of shallow cups that give these cakes their name, were a fixture of the mid-nineteenth-century North American kitchen and were widely sold; the batter cooked in them could be wheat, corn, or graham. The brand-name call for Cook's Friend baking powder is itself a period marker: chemical leaveners were new enough that cooks sometimes specified a maker.