Home › Cookies and Small Cakes › Oatmeal Jim-Jams
Oatmeal Jim-Jams
1 cup butter or shortening 1 cup brown sugar 2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup sour milk 2 cups ground oatmeal Cream the butter or shortening with the sugar. Sift the flour, salt and soda and add with the oatmeal to the first mixture, alternating with the milk. If ground oatmeal is not procurable, rolled oats may be ground in a food-chopper and measured after grinding. Toss on a floured board and roll thin. Cut in rounds. Put on greased baking-sheet and bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F.) twelve to fifteen minutes. When cool, put together like sandwiches with the following filling: 3/4 pound chopped dates 3/4 cup sugar 1/2 cup boiling water Cook ingredients together until thick. Cool before spreading.
A rolled oat-flour cookie sandwiched with date paste, of the sort sold in the 1920s and '30s as date bars or "jim-jams." The dough handles like shortbread and needs the same restraint.
- Ground oatmealThis means oats reduced to a coarse flour, not rolled oats left whole. A food processor does in 30 seconds what the food-chopper did slowly; measure the 2 cups after grinding, as the recipe says, since volume drops considerably.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Use 1/2 cup buttermilk, or add 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar to 1/2 cup whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is balanced against the sour milk. Without an acid milk, unneutralised soda can leave a faint soapy or metallic taste.
- Oven350F as printed, which can be taken at face value. Twelve to fifteen minutes gives a dry, crisp round; pull them at twelve if your rounds are thin.
- Rolling thinThe dough is half oat flour, which dilutes the wheat gluten, so it tears rather than stretches. Chill it 30 minutes, roll between sheets of parchment, and keep the flour on the board light or the cookies turn chalky.
- The date fillingThree-quarters of a pound of chopped dates with 3/4 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water cooks down in 8 to 10 minutes to a stiff jam. Stir constantly at the end; date sugars scorch quickly. It must be fully cool before spreading or it will soak the cookies limp.
- YieldDepends on how thin you roll and how large you cut; a batch this size will give several dozen rounds, and half that many finished sandwiches. They soften after a day in a tin.
"Jim-jams" was period slang for the jitters, and also for trifles or knick-knacks; the name is attached to filled cookies in some American cookbooks of the period. The same object appears elsewhere as date sandwiches, date bars or matrimonials, the last name still current in western Canada. Rolled oats were cheap and heavily promoted by American millers from the 1880s onward, and packed dates were widely available to grocers by the early twentieth century. The New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, a Butterick women's magazine.