Home › February › Chocolate Jumbles
Chocolate Jumbles
1/3 cup Cottolene. 2 eggs beaten thick and light. 1 cup sugar. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 2 squares chocolate grated. 2 cups flour. 1 tablespoon milk or water. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly, add chocolate, milk and eggs. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture. Add more flour if necessary. Dough should be soft. Toss on a floured board, roll out to one-half inch thickness, shape with a doughnut cutter, sprinkle with granulated sugar and bake ten to twelve minutes in a hot oven.
A rolled cookie dough, cut into rings and baked hot and fast. Two ingredients need translating and the oven number is unstated.
- CottoleneA branded shortening made from cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, heavily advertised in the 1890s and early 1900s and long gone from shops. Use 1/3 cup vegetable shortening for the same texture, or the same amount of softened butter for better flavour and slightly more spread.
- Squares of chocolateBaking chocolate was sold in 1-ounce squares, unsweetened. Two squares means 2 oz unsweetened chocolate; grate it cold on a box grater rather than melting it, since the dry shreds are what the method assumes.
- Hot ovenSet 400-425F. At that heat the ten to twelve minutes given is right; the rings should look dry at the edges and still soft in the centre when they come out.
- Dough consistencyThe instruction to add more flour is the hinge. Chill the dough 30 minutes before rolling instead of flouring it stiff, or the jumbles bake up dry and tough.
- Half-inch thicknessThicker than most modern rolled cookies, and deliberate. Rolled thin they become crisp wafers and will scorch in a hot oven well before twelve minutes.
- Doughnut cutterCuts a ring, the usual shape for American jumbles of this period, though the name also covered knots and coils. A 2 1/2-inch round cutter with a bottle cap or small cutter for the hole does the same job.
- YieldNo yield is given; at 2 1/2 inches across and half an inch thick, expect roughly 20 rings, depending on how the scraps are re-rolled. Sprinkle the granulated sugar on just before baking so it sticks.
Jumbles are an old English cookie, appearing in seventeenth-century manuscript receipt books as "jumballs" — a stiff sugar-and-egg dough, often rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled before the plain doughnut-cutter ring of American cookbooks became usual. The chocolate here is a later addition. The recipe's real period marker is Cottolene: 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured it, and the book is a promotional cookbook of the kind common at the time, with the sponsor's fat called for throughout. Cottonseed shortening was sold hard to American housewives as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to lard, and books like this one were the vehicle.