Gems
One pint warm water, one teaspoonful salt, graham flour enough to make a stiff batter. Have your irons and oven both hot.
A three-ingredient quick bread with no leavening at all — the rise comes entirely from steam hitting a scorching-hot cast-iron pan. Everything depends on preheating the pan properly.
- Preheat the iron, then grease itSet a cast-iron gem or popover pan (or a heavy muffin tin) in the oven while it heats, and only pull it out to grease and fill it. Batter dropped into a cold pan produces dense, damp lumps rather than a risen gem.
- "Hot oven" means 425-450F"Hot oven" -- The recipe specifies only that the oven and irons be hot; in a modern oven that is somewhere around 425-450F. The initial blast of heat is the only leavening the recipe has, so it should not be reduced.
- One pint is two cupsTwo cups of warm water and a teaspoon of salt will take roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of graham flour to reach a stiff batter — thick enough to mound on a spoon but not a dough you would knead.
- Graham flourA coarse whole-wheat flour, unsifted, named for Sylvester Graham. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest substitute; regular whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, less nutty crumb.
- No egg, no milk, no sodaThis is the plainest form of the gem, and it is meant to be. If you want a lighter result, that is a different recipe — adding baking powder to this batter changes the texture but also the character.
- Baking timeExpect 25 to 30 minutes. The gems are done when firmly set and browned; underbaked graham gems collapse and taste raw.
- Yield and servingA dozen or more gems, depending on the size of the cups; this quantity of batter may well overfill a single 12-cup pan. Serve hot, split, with butter -- being eggless and fatless, they stale quickly.
The gem is a distinctly American nineteenth-century baked good, defined less by its ingredients than by its pan: a heavy cast-iron mold of shallow oval or round cups, sold as a "gem iron" and preheated until it sizzled. Graham gems in particular belong to the dietary reform current that ran through American cookery after Sylvester Graham's 1830s campaign for coarse unsifted wheat flour, plain food and minimal stimulation of the palate. That heritage explains the austerity here — water, salt and flour, with no egg, fat, sugar or leavening — which reform cooks regarded as a virtue rather than a lack.