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Corn Breakfast Cakes
Mrs. Parmelee.
One half cup of sweet milk, two cups of flour, one corn meal, two eggs, butter size of an egg, tablespoon of Cook's Friend baking powder mixed with flour; bake in small gem tins and cook quarter of an hour in a quick oven.
A plain gem-pan cornbread from a Canadian community cookbook, written for a cook who already knew what the batter should look like. One measurement almost certainly did not survive the typesetter.
- The milk is the problemHalf a cup of milk against three cups of dry meal and flour plus two eggs looks too little to make a batter. A cup and a half may be the intent; in any case add milk until the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than trusting the printed figure.
- "One corn meal"Read as one cup of cornmeal, matching the two cups of flour above it. A modern medium or fine yellow meal will serve.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and beat it in with the eggs and milk rather than cutting it into the flour.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Montreal-made brand widely sold in nineteenth-century Canada and used here simply as a generic. A tablespoon of modern double-acting baking powder is more leavening than three cups of flour needs; two teaspoons is closer, and the batter should go into the oven promptly.
- A quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a quick oven is conventionally read as roughly 400–450F. Gem irons were often heated empty, greased, and filled hot so the cakes set with a crisp shell.
- Gem tinsUsually cast iron with small, deep, rounded cups, though stamped tin pans were also sold — a standard muffin tin is the nearest thing, though the crust will be softer. Fill about two-thirds.
- Timing and yieldA quarter of an hour is right for small gems at that heat; check at 12 minutes. The quantity fills roughly a dozen standard muffin cups.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns in Canada, and the format shows: each receipt carries a subscriber's name, and Mrs. Parmelee is writing for peers who needed a proportion, not a lesson. Cakes baked in gem irons were a common North American breakfast dish of the period, quick-raised with chemical leavening rather than yeast, and the naming of a specific brand — Cook's Friend, a Montreal-made baking powder widely sold in Canada in the later nineteenth century — is typical of how commercial products entered domestic cooking at a time when packaged baking powder was displacing saleratus and sour milk. The blend of cornmeal with wheat flour was economical: cornmeal alone was cheap and plentiful but coarse, and flour lightened it.