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Graham Breakfast Cakes
Mrs. Gibbs.
Two cups of Graham flour, one cup of wheat flour, two eggs well beaten; mix with sweet milk, to make a very thin batter; bake in gem irons; have the irons hot, then set them on the upper grate in the oven ; will bake in fifteen minutes.
A leavening-free batter cake that rises on steam alone, closer to a popover than a muffin. Everything depends on the irons being genuinely hot before the batter goes in.
- Preheat the irons emptyThere is no baking powder or soda here; the lift comes entirely from steam hitting a screaming-hot greased pan. Set the greased gem irons in the oven while it heats and fill them the moment they come out.
- Gem ironsHeavy cast-iron pans with shallow oval or round cups, the ancestor of the muffin tin. A cast-iron popover pan is the closest match; a standard steel muffin tin works but gives less rise and a paler crust.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Fifteen minutes on an upper rack points to a hot oven; somewhere around 425F is a reasonable modern reading. A moderate oven risks setting the batter before it can climb.
- Graham flourCoarse, unsifted whole wheat flour, named for Sylvester Graham. Whole wheat flour is the substitute; stone-ground gives a texture nearer the original. Nothing to do with graham crackers as sold now.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk used in soda-leavened recipes. No quantity is given: add whole milk until the batter pours in a thin stream.
- "Very thin batter"Thinner than pancake batter, closer to heavy cream. A thick batter here produces a dense, damp cake because there is nothing to raise it.
- Upper grateIn a wood range the top of the oven was the fiercest heat. In a modern oven, the upper third of the oven does the same job.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; a dozen or more gems, depending on the size of the irons. Eat them hot from the pan with butter; without chemical leavening they collapse and toughen as they cool.
Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer whose 1830s lectures urged coarse, unbolted wheat on a public he believed had been ruined by fine white flour, meat and stimulants. By the 1870s his crusading had softened into ordinary domestic practice: Graham flour sat on the shelf beside wheat flour, and cooks used the two together, as Mrs. Gibbs does, to get some of the virtue without all of the coarseness. Gem irons were a fixture of the same period, sold by the stove foundries and heated in the oven or over the fire; recipes of this era assume the reader owns a set and needs no explanation of them. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributed receipts to raise money for charity, is typical in crediting each dish to the woman who sent it in.