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Angelica Wine Jumbles
One-half cup butter, one-half cup milk, one cup granulated sugar, two eggs, three teaspoons baking powder, enough flour to roll out thin; after they are baked, dip them in wine, then in granulated sugar.
A plain rolled cookie with the flavour carried almost entirely by the finishing dip, so the wine matters more than the dough. The original gives no flour weight, no oven heat and no time, all of which need filling in.
- Flour, unspecified"Enough flour to roll out thin" is genuinely open-ended, but a dough of this ratio usually lands between 3 and 3 1/2 cups. Add it in stages until the dough is firm enough to roll at about 1/8 inch without sticking, and chill it for half an hour if it fights you.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Thin jumbles want a fairly hot oven; try 375-400F and expect roughly 6 to 9 minutes. They go from pale to bitter fast, so pull them when the edges are just colouring.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to roughly three cups of flour works out at about a teaspoon per cup, at the upper end of ordinary modern practice rather than clearly excessive. If you find a soapy or metallic edge, two teaspoons reads cleaner.
- Angelica wineAngelica is a sweet fortified white wine, historically a California speciality made from Mission grapes and rarely stocked now. Any sweet fortified white -- a cream sherry, a white port, or a Muscat -- gives the same effect: sugar, alcohol and a slight raisin note.
- The dip is the hingeDip while the cookies are still warm but not hot, and briefly. A quick pass on each side lets the wine soak the surface; a soak turns them to mush, and cold cookies take up almost nothing and shed the sugar.
- Sugar coatingGranulated sugar is what the recipe asks for and it gives the intended crunch, but it needs the surface still damp to stick. Coat one tray at a time rather than dipping everything and sugaring afterwards.
- Yield and keepingExpect about four dozen 2-inch cookies. The wine keeps them soft, so they do not store like a dry jumble -- eat them within two days or the sugar crust dissolves.
Jumbles are one of the oldest surviving English cookie forms, appearing in printed receipt books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward, often as a stiff dough rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled -- the name is sometimes traced to that twisting rather than to any ingredient, though the derivation is unsettled and a link to 'gemel', twin rings, has also been proposed. By the late nineteenth century in American household books they had settled into a plain rolled and cut sugar cookie, cheap and quick. The Angelica finish points to a particular moment: sweet fortified wine from California vineyards was widely and inexpensively available in American kitchens before Prohibition, and pouring it over cake and cookies seems to have been one way to dress up ordinary baking without a cooked icing.