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Oatmeal Jam-Jams (Eggless)
2 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups rolled oats 1 cup dripping 1 cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon soda Sour milk.
Rub all ingredients together with the exception of the soda, which should be dissolved in enough sour milk to hold other ingredients together. Roll thin. Have ready 1 pound of figs cooked soft with 1 cup sugar and a little water. Cut cakes into shapes and put a spoonful of figs on top then put another cake on and press edges firmly together and bake in a hot oven. These are delicious. Filling may be altered to suit taste.
A filled rolled cookie of the kind Canadian cooks called jam-jams, leavened with soda and sour milk instead of eggs. The instructions are workable as written once a few of the terms are translated.
- Ignore the last lineThe trailing "2 cups sugar, 1 cup lard, 2 eggs" does not belong to this dough; it appears to be a stray fragment, most likely the opening of the next recipe on the page.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat saved from roasting, used here as the shortening. Butter, lard or vegetable shortening all work in the same volume; butter will spread a little more and brown faster.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk in this period means naturally clabbered raw milk, roughly as acidic as modern buttermilk. Buttermilk is the direct substitute, and the acid is what activates the teaspoon of soda, so do not swap in sweet milk.
- How much liquidThe quantity is not specified: add the soda-and-buttermilk mixture a spoonful at a time until the crumbs just come together, perhaps 1/3 to 2/3 cup. A stiff dough rolls and seals better than a soft one.
- Hot oven400 to 425F. At that heat expect 8 to 12 minutes for thin rolled cookies; watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Rolling thin with rolled oatsOats resist a thin sheet and tear the edges. Chill the dough 30 minutes, roll between sheets of parchment, and cut rounds of about 2 1/2 inches.
- The fig fillingA pound of dried figs, stemmed and chopped, simmered with a cup of sugar and a little water until jammy, then cooled completely. Warm filling will soak the bottom cake and blow the seal in the oven.
- SealingUse a scant teaspoon of filling, leave a clear border, and press the edges with a fork. Overfilled jam-jams split and weld themselves to the pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a batch this size makes several dozen filled cookies at 2 1/2 inches. They soften after a day in a tin.
Jam-jams are a fixture of Maritime and Ontario home baking: two thin soft cookies sandwiched around a cooked fruit filling, named for the jam rather than for any particular fruit, and often made with whatever the pantry held, raspberry, date or, as here, stewed figs. The "eggless" note in the title and the use of dripping instead of butter mark this as a thrift recipe, the kind of formula that circulated widely when eggs were seasonal and expensive and roasting fat was too valuable to discard. It appears in the Five Roses Cook Book, compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company (head office Montreal, mill at Keewatin, Ontario) from recipes sent in by Canadian users of the company's flour, which explains the loose measurements and the confident closing verdict, "These are delicious" -- the voice of the contributor rather than an editor.