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Graham Gems
Mrs. E. R. Harmon.
One quart of sweet milk, one cup syrup, one teaspoon soda, two teaspoons cream tartar, little salt; mix cream tartar in graham flour, soda in milk, and make it as stiff with the flour as will make it drop easily from the spoon into muffin rings.
A plain quick bread of the leavening-by-hand era, when cooks combined soda and cream of tartar themselves instead of reaching for a tin of baking powder. The batter is simple; the heat of the pan is what decides whether you get gems or hockey pucks.
- Preheat the pan, not just the ovenCast-iron gem pans were set in the oven empty until they were fiercely hot, then greased and filled, so the batter seized and climbed at once. Skipping this is the usual reason a graham gem comes out squat and dense.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven guidance. A hot oven, around 425F, suits gems of this kind; twenty to twenty-five minutes is typical for a standard muffin cup.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal rings set on a hot greased sheet or griddle, an older alternative to a gem pan. A standard 12-cup muffin tin does the same work.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; regular whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nubbly crumb.
- SyrupIn an American kitchen of this date this means cane, sorghum or molasses syrup, not maple unless specified. One cup is the sweetener and part of the liquid both, so do not swap in a dry sugar without adjusting.
- Soda and cream of tartarThe two-to-one ratio here is homemade baking powder. Mixing the cream of tartar into the flour and the soda into the milk keeps them apart until the last moment, which is the point of the instruction. If you substitute commercial baking powder, roughly 4 teaspoons stands in for this pair.
- ConsistencyThe only guide given is that it should drop easily from the spoon. Aim for a thick batter that falls in a lump rather than pouring; graham flour keeps absorbing liquid, so mix and bake without letting it stand.
- YieldA quart of milk makes a very large batch, likely three dozen or more standard muffins. Halve it comfortably for a household of two or three.
Graham flour and the gems made from it carry the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer whose dietary preaching in the 1830s and 1840s urged coarse unbolted wheat, plain cooking and no stimulants. Long after his followers dwindled, the flour kept his name and turned up in ordinary community cookbooks like this one as simply a wholesome everyday ingredient rather than a creed. "Gem" is an American term for a small quick bread baked in the heavy cast-iron gem pan, a fixture of nineteenth-century kitchens whose deep, well-separated cups were designed to be preheated until they hissed. The recipe's split leavening, cream of tartar into the flour and soda into the milk, shows a cook working before reliable commercial baking powder had displaced the older two-part method.