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Jam-Jams (No. 2)
2 quarts Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1½ cups lard 1½ cups yellow sugar (rolled smooth) 3 eggs 1 tablespoon vanilla Milk.
Wet the soda with milk. Add lard, flour, sugar. Then add the eggs. Knead well and roll thin. Cut long with knife and put jam in between. Ice or not, according to taste. Good either way. 2 cups sugar
A very large batch of rolled sandwich cookies from a flour-company book, written for a cook who already knew what a jam-jam looked like. The quantities are worth reading twice before you start.
- Scale it downTwo quarts of flour is roughly 8 cups, about 2 lb, and the batch will make several dozen filled cookies. Halving works well; if you quarter it, the three eggs will have to be divided by eye.
- Flour by volumeA quart measure of flour is 4 cups, so weigh if you can: somewhere between about 960 g and 1.1 kg for the full batch, depending how it is scooped. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour, close to a modern bread-leaning all-purpose; plain all-purpose is fine here.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder. If you would rather use commercial powder, substitute about 4 teaspoons and skip both, but keep the milk.
- Yellow sugarThis is light brown sugar. "Rolled smooth" means crushed with a rolling pin to break up lumps, which was necessary before free-flowing packaged sugar.
- LardA cup and a half of lard gives a short, slightly savoury crumb. Butter or shortening will work; butter spreads more, so chill the cut shapes before baking.
- The milk is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity because the dough was judged by hand. Wet the soda in a couple of tablespoons, then add milk a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds together as a stiff, rollable mass, no softer than pastry dough.
- Don't overwork it"Knead well" here means bring it together smoothly, not develop gluten. Extended kneading makes the cookies tough; a short working and a rest in the refrigerator makes them easier to roll thin.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just set and barely coloured. Cool completely before filling or the jam soaks through.
- Filling and assembly"Cut long with a knife" means strips or bars rather than rounds. Sandwich two pieces with a thick jam that will not run: raspberry, damson or any well-set preserve.
- The stray "2 cups sugar"This trails the recipe with no instruction attached. Given the "ice or not" line it may be the start of the optional icing, though the recipe does not say so. Two cups icing sugar with enough milk or water to make a spreadable glaze would do the job.
Jam-jams are a Canadian and Maritime household cookie, two thin rolled biscuits sandwiched with preserve, and they turn up repeatedly in early twentieth-century Canadian community and promotional cookbooks — often, as here, in more than one version, since every family had its own. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell Five Roses flour, and its recipes were largely contributed by Canadian housewives, which explains the shorthand: no oven temperature, no baking time, no measured milk, because the contributor assumed her reader had made pastry dough by feel a thousand times. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening, and the use of lard rather than butter, are often taken as marks of the era when commercial baking powder was spreading but, it is generally said, had not yet displaced older methods in rural kitchens, where farm lard was widely used for baking.