Home › Small Cakes of All Kinds › Ginger Jam-Jams
Ginger Jam-Jams
½ cup sugar 1 cup molasses 1 cup shortening 1 cup hot water 1 teaspoon soda (Eggless) 1 tablespoon vanilla 1 teaspoon ginger Pinch of salt Five Roses flour to mix stiff.
A bare-bones molasses cookie dough of the sort that assumes the cook already knows what a jam-jam is: a rolled cookie, cut in rounds, baked, then sandwiched in pairs with jam. Everything the original leaves out is filling, flour and oven.
- The flour is up to you"Flour to mix stiff" with this much liquid generally lands around 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose, added a cup at a time until the dough is rollable and no longer tacky. Stop as soon as it holds together; the extra cup that makes handling easy is also the cup that makes the cookies dry.
- Dissolve the soda in the hot waterThat is what the cup of hot water is for. Stirred into the molasses and soda, it foams and spreads the leavening evenly through a heavy batter that has no eggs to help it.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period this meant lard or a vegetable shortening such as the then-new hydrogenated fats. A cup of modern shortening works as written; butter gives more flavour and a slightly softer, more spreading cookie.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses or a mild fancy molasses. Blackstrap is bitter and less acidic than what the recipe assumes, so it gives the single teaspoon of soda less to react with.
- A tablespoon of vanillaThat is more than a modern baker would use in a batch this size; two teaspoons is plenty alongside the ginger and molasses.
- OvenBake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes for cookies rolled about a quarter inch thick. They should still look slightly soft in the centre when they come out; molasses cookies firm up as they cool and go hard if baked to done-looking.
- The jamThe recipe names no filling because the name supplies it. Bake the rounds, cool them completely, then sandwich in pairs with a stiff jam - raspberry and strawberry are traditional. A soft jam will soak the cookie within a day.
- YieldThis is a large batch by modern standards. The dough chills and rolls better after an hour in the refrigerator, and halving it is reasonable.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to sell Five Roses flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives - which may be why the instructions are so telegraphic. The contributor seems to have assumed readers knew that jam-jams are sandwich cookies; the book only needed to supply proportions. Jam-jams are associated with the Maritimes and rural Ontario, where molasses was an everyday sweetener long after refined sugar became affordable, arriving north from the West Indies trade in barrels. The parenthetical "(Eggless)" is worth noticing: it may have been offered for the times of year or the households where eggs were scarce or dear, and the hot water and soda are doing the work eggs would otherwise share.