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Jumbles in Muffin Rings
Two cups sugar, three eggs, three cups flour, one-half cup butter, three teaspoons baking powder, a little nutmeg. Beat the whites of the eggs separately, butter muffin rings and bake.
A late-Victorian jumble batter that skips the traditional hand-shaping and uses metal rings as moulds. The original gives no oven temperature, time or yield, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Muffin ringsThese are plain metal bands, about 3 inches across and an inch deep, set on a heavy baking sheet or griddle rather than in a pan. Buttered egg rings or crumpet rings do the same job; a shallow muffin tin is the closest common substitute.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, as was normal when the cook judged the fire. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this batter; 10 to 14 minutes, until the tops are set and just colouring at the edges.
- MeasurementsHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz or about 113 g. Taking the cup as the 8-fl-oz measure, 2 cups sugar is roughly 400 g and 3 cups flour roughly 375 g, though cup sizes were not yet fully standardised, so treat these as approximate.
- No liquidThree eggs are the only moisture for three cups of flour, which gives a thick, almost paste-like batter rather than something pourable. Resist adding milk; the rings hold it in shape and it spreads a little as the butter melts.
- The whitesBeating them separately and folding them in last is the only leavening help beyond the baking powder, and the point of the instruction. Fold until just combined, then get the pans into the oven without waiting.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. A quarter teaspoon is "a little" for this quantity, and it is the only flavouring in the recipe, so pre-ground jars will read as flat.
- YieldAbout two dozen small cakes, depending on ring size. They keep two or three days in a tin and firm up considerably as they cool.
Jumbles are one of the oldest sweets in English printed cookery, appearing from the sixteenth century onward as a stiff, well-spiced dough rolled into ropes and tied into rings or knots; the name is often linked to gemel or gimmal, a linked or twin ring, though the origin is not settled. By the end of the nineteenth century the term had loosened to mean almost any plain sugar-and-egg cake. Setting them in muffin rings, as here, keeps the ring form without the hand-shaping.