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Date Cookies (Oatmeal)
1 cup brown sugar ½ cup shortening 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup sour milk 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon molasses.
Roll pastry very thin and cut with small cake cutter. Bake. When cool, spread with date filling and press two together in jam-jam style.
A sour-milk sandwich cooky from a Canadian flour-company book, written for cooks who already knew the drill. Almost everything unstated — oven heat, baking time, the filling itself — has to be supplied.
- The missing oatmealThe title promises oatmeal but the ingredient list has none. Some comparable books of the period substitute rolled oats for part of the flour, but no proportion can be recovered from this page. Made exactly as printed you get a plain molasses sour-milk cooky.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to activate the teaspoon of soda. Modern pasteurized milk spoils rather than sours; use ½ cup buttermilk, or ½ cup milk with 1½ teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- ShorteningIn Canada at this date this could be lard, or one of the newer vegetable shortenings. Butter works and tastes better, though the dough will spread a little more.
- Oven heatNone is given. Thin rolled sour-milk cookies suit a moderately quick oven; around 375F for 6 to 8 minutes is a reasonable modern reading. They colour fast at the edges and scorch if left longer.
- Rolling very thinThis is the hinge. The rounds have to be thin and crisp or the finished sandwich is a brick. Chill the dough at least an hour first; brown sugar and shortening make it soft and sticky at room temperature, and flour added at the board to compensate toughens it.
- Date fillingThe book assumes you have one. A workable filling is about 1 lb pitted dates chopped, ½ cup water, ¼ cup sugar and a squeeze of lemon, cooked to a thick paste and cooled completely before spreading.
- Jam-jamsA Canadian and Maritime term for two thin cookies sandwiched with jam or fruit paste. "Press two together in jam-jam style" simply means match the rounds in pairs, filling in between.
- YieldRolled thin and cut with a 2-inch cutter, this dough makes roughly 5 dozen rounds, so about 30 sandwiches. They soften pleasantly if stored a day in a tin with the lid on.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to sell its Five Roses flour, and it did so by collecting recipes submitted by Canadian housewives — a formula that put it in a great many Canadian kitchens, a fixture in prairie and Maritime kitchens for decades. Jam-jams belong squarely to that world: a sour-milk dough leavened with soda, sweetened with brown sugar and a spoonful of molasses, rolled out and sandwiched with whatever fruit paste the pantry held. Dates were a common choice, alongside other dried fruits. Recipes of this kind assume a cook who knows her own stove, which is why the instruction here amounts to the single word "Bake."