Lemon Jumbles
One tea-cup butter, two tea-cups sugar, two teaspoons sweet milk, two eggs, a piece of soda the size of a dice, juice and rind of one-half lemon; make as soft as possible, roll very thin, sprinkle sugar on them before putting in the oven and bake quickly.
A short, elliptical cookie recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what jumble dough should feel like. Two things are missing outright — the flour and the yield — and one measurement is genuinely unclear.
- No flour is givenThis is the hinge. Work flour into the creamed butter, sugar, eggs, milk and lemon only until the dough just holds together and can be rolled — roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for these quantities. Any more and thin-rolled jumbles turn hard rather than crisp.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, not a full modern measuring cup. So about 3/4 cup (12 tablespoons) of butter to 1 1/2 cups sugar. Some books used the teacup as a full cup, so the butter-to-sugar ratio here is approximate either way.
- A piece of soda the size of a diceSaleratus and baking soda were sold in lumps that had to be crushed. A half-inch cube is in the neighbourhood of 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of modern baking soda; use 1/4 teaspoon, which is enough to react with the lemon juice.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for alongside soda. Here the acid comes from the lemon instead.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe says only to bake quickly; a quick oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat, dough rolled as thin as instructed will be done in a very few minutes, and the sugared tops will scorch if left longer. Watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Rolling and shapingRoll no more than 1/8 inch thick on a lightly floured board; chilling the dough first makes a butter-heavy dough like this manageable. Jumbles were traditionally cut as rings or rounds.
- Lemon rindGrate the zest only, avoiding the white pith, and add it to the sugar when creaming so the oils are released into the fat.
- YieldExpect roughly four dozen thin two-inch cookies, depending on the cutter. Thin sugared cookies of this kind keep reasonably well in a tin.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously baked English sweets, appearing in printed cookery books from the sixteenth century onward as "jumballs" — a stiff, often ring-shaped or knotted biscuit flavoured with rosewater, caraway or aniseed. The name is generally traced to the knotted or twinned shapes the dough was tied into, sometimes linked to the "gemel" or twin ring, though that derivation is traditional rather than settled. By the time this book was compiled, the older aromatic seasonings had largely given way to lemon and vanilla, and the dough had been lightened with saleratus.