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Oatmeal Jim-Jams
1 cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon soda
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup sour milk
2 cups flour
2 cups ground oatmeal
½ teaspoon salt
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° F.) twelve to fifteen minutes. When cool, put together like sandwiches with the following filling:
¾ pound chopped dates
½ cup boiling water
¾ cup sugar
Cook ingredients together until thick. Cool before spreading. CAKES
A rolled date-sandwich cookie of a type that was standard in American home baking around 1900-1930. Nothing here is difficult, but two ingredients need translating and the dough behaves better cold than the instructions suggest.
- Ground oatmealThis means oats ground to a meal, not whole rolled oats. The recipe already tells you to grind rolled oats and measure after grinding, which matters: 2 cups of ground oats is considerably more oat than 2 cups measured whole. A food processor does the job in under a minute; commercial oat flour works, though it is finer than a food-chopper grind would have been.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct replacement; failing that, half a cup of milk with a teaspoon and a half of lemon juice or vinegar, left to stand ten minutes.
- Soda without added acidThe teaspoon of soda depends entirely on the sour milk for lift and for neutralising. If you substitute sweet milk the cookies will taste faintly soapy.
- OvenThe book gives 350° F outright. Twelve to fifteen minutes is right for thin rounds; pull them when the edges have just coloured, since ground oats colour faster than wheat flour.
- Chill before rollingA cup of butter to two cups of flour is a rich, soft dough. Refrigerate it at least an hour before you roll it thin, and work with half at a time, or it will tear and stick regardless of how much flour goes on the board.
- The filling is the hingeThree-quarters of a pound of dates with only half a cup of water needs constant stirring and low heat, and it goes from thick to scorched quickly. Cook to a spreadable jam, not a paste, and cool it fully before assembling or the cookies soften through.
- YieldThe book gives no yield or cutter size. Rolled thin and cut in 2-inch rounds, the dough should give somewhere around five dozen wafers, so roughly 30 sandwiches. The date filling is generous for that number; leftover filling keeps a week refrigerated.
- StoringFilled cookies soften within a day as moisture migrates from the dates. If you want them crisp, store the rounds and filling separately and sandwich them as needed.
"Jim-jams" was one of several jokey names American cooks gave the date-filled oatmeal sandwich cookie, alongside date bars, date sandwiches and date turnovers. The dish belongs to a specific moment: dried dates had become a familiar grocery item, oats were being aggressively promoted by cereal millers, and home cooks still routinely had sour milk on hand. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of practical housekeepers, is typical in offering a cookie built from pantry staples and finished with a boiled fruit filling rather than icing. The instruction to grind rolled oats in a food-chopper is a small window on the period kitchen, where a hand-cranked meat grinder was the closest thing to a general-purpose mill.