Soft Jumbles
One pint sugar, one-half pound butter, one quart and one gill flour, one teaspoon soda dissolved in one and one-half gills sweet milk, one nutmeg, two teaspoons cream tartar sifted with the flour, four eggs. Stir the butter and sugar together to a cream and beat in the eggs one by one. Add the milk, nutmeg and flour, roll and bake.
A plain rolled cookie built on the old soda-plus-cream-of-tartar system rather than commercial baking powder. The measurements are given by volume in units that need translating, and the dough is soft enough that chilling is the difference between rolling it and fighting it.
- The measurements in modern termsOne pint sugar is 2 cups; half a pound of butter is 1 cup, or two sticks. A quart and a gill of flour is 4 1/2 cups (a gill is half a cup), and one and one-half gills of milk is 3/4 cup.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is the period's homemade leavening, in the common 1:2 ratio. If you substitute commercial double-acting baking powder, roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons is the usual equivalent, though the original pair reacts faster in the bowl.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons of ground spice, which is assertive by current standards. Half that amount reads as spiced rather than medicinal to most modern palates.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the era called for. Whole milk is the closest match.
- \dough is soft, as the title promises. Chill it at least an hour, work with a quarter of it at a time on a well-floured board, and roll no thinner than 1/4 inch; jumbles were traditionally cut into rings or coiled into loops.
- Oven and timeThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just set and barely coloured. These are meant to stay pale and cakey, so pull them before they brown across the top.
- YieldA very large batch by modern standards, on the order of six to seven dozen cookies. The dough halves cleanly, and it keeps a day or two wrapped in the refrigerator.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously made English sweets, appearing in printed receipt books from the sixteenth century onward, usually as a stiff paste of sugar, eggs and flour formed into rings or knots; the name is often traced to gemel, a twin or double ring, which matches the looped shapes early versions took. By the nineteenth century American cookbooks carried whole clusters of jumble recipes distinguished only by texture and flavouring, with the older crisp version sitting alongside softer, butter-and-milk types like this one.