Ginger Gems
1 cupful sugar ½ eggs ½ cupful Crisco 1 cupful milk 3/4 cupful chopped preserved ginger 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 3 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add eggs well beaten. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together and add alternately with milk to. first mixture. Now mix in ginger and divide mixture into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in hot oven twenty-five minutes. Sufficient for sixteen gems.
A plain muffin batter carrying chopped preserved ginger, written to sell shortening. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start.
- The Crisco quantity looks wrongOne and a half cups of fat against three cups of flour and one cup of milk is far richer than a gem batter normally runs, and would tend to bake greasy. A typesetting error for a smaller measure is plausible; if you scale it back to what a rich muffin needs, understand that you are departing from the printed text.
- The stray last line"2 cupfuls scalded milk" does not belong to this list of ingredients and is almost certainly an orphan from an adjoining recipe. Ignore it; the milk in this batter is the one cup listed above.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans, which period instructions often direct you to heat in the oven before filling. A standard 12-cup muffin tin does the same job; the yield of sixteen means you will need a second tin or a second batch.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figure; a hot oven of this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat is on the long side for a standard muffin cup -- start checking at eighteen minutes, and expect the full time only if your cups are deep.
- Preserved gingerGinger stems cooked in heavy syrup, sold in jars or in crystallised form. Drain and blot syrup-packed ginger before chopping, or the pieces sink. Crystallised ginger works; fresh ginger does not, being neither sweet nor soft.
- "Criscoed and floured"Grease and flour the pans, or use paper liners. The batter is sweet and sticky where the ginger touches the tin.
- HandlingFold the flour and milk in only until combined. This is a muffin method dressed up with creamed fat and sugar, and it toughens the same way if overworked.
- YieldSixteen gems, best the day they are baked; the ginger keeps them moist a day longer than a plain muffin.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the years just after Crisco itself came on the market in 1911, and it is a cookbook with a commercial argument to make: every recipe in it uses the product, often in place of butter and lard at once. "Gems" is the older American name for what we now call muffins, and the heavy cast-iron gem pans took their name from the little breads ot preated so the batter set the moment it hit them, rows of shallow cups that were standard equipment in nineteenth-century kitchens. Preserved ginger, imported in stoneware jars largely from China and sold by grocers as a semi-luxury, was a familiar way to flavour cakes and puddings, and its syrup-soft texture is the point of the recipe: sweet warm pockets in an otherwise plain crumb.