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Gems
Mrs. Munshaw.
One piece butter size of a walnut, three teas, ons sugar, three eggs, one-half cup sweet milk, flour enough to make a nice thick batter ; have your gem pans burning hot; bake in very hot oven.
A gem is a small quick bread baked in a cast-iron gem pan, and this version leans on eggs and fierce heat rather than any chemical leavening. The heat of the pan is the whole recipe.
- Heat the pan empty firstSet the greased gem pan in the oven until it is genuinely hot, then pour in the batter and return it at once. With no baking powder or soda in the formula, the rise comes entirely from steam and beaten egg hitting hot iron. A cold pan gives flat, tough little cakes.
- "Very hot oven"Roughly 425-450F is a reasonable modern reading, though nineteenth-century "very hot" could run hotter still and the book gives no figures. Modern muffin tins are thinner than nineteenth-century gem irons and may scorch the bottoms sooner, so check at 12 minutes.
- Butter the size of a walnutSomewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons; period equivalences vary. Melting it and beating it in with the eggs is one workable way to incorporate it.
- "Three teas, ons sugar"A typesetting slip for three teaspoons sugar. That is barely sweet by current standards, which is correct for a gem; it was eaten with butter at breakfast, not as a cupcake.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured milk. The word distinguishes it from the buttermilk or sour milk called for in recipes that use saleratus; here there is no soda in the list in any case.
- "Flour enough to make a nice thick batter"With three eggs and half a cup of milk this will take a fair amount of flour, plausibly a cup and a half or more. Add it until the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours, and stop mixing as soon as the flour is wet.
- YieldPerhaps eight to twelve small gems, depending on the size of the cups. Fill them two-thirds full and eat them hot; gems with no chemical leavening are best fresh and stiffen as they cool.
Gems belong to the American family of quick breads that grew up alongside cast iron in the nineteenth century. The gem pan, a heavy plate of iron cast with six to a dozen deep oval or round cups, was being sold under that name by the 1860s and 1870s, and the names of pan and cake travelled together, though which took its name from the other is not settled. Earlier gem recipes such as this one often carry no leavening at all, relying on well-beaten eggs and a scorching pan in the manner of a popover or a Yorkshire pudding; as baking powder became cheap and reliable later in the century, gem recipes generally took it up and drifted toward what we would now call a muffin. The Home Cook Book, compiled from contributions by named subscribers, preserves the older method under Mrs. Munshaw's name, along with the shorthand: butter the size of a walnut, flour enough for a nice thick batter.