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Cocoa-Nut Jumbles
Two cups sugar, one cup butter, two eggs, half a grated cocoanut; make just stiff enough to roll out; roll thin. -Mrs. Ida M. Donaldson, Springdale, Col.
A jumble recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows the dough: the flour is left entirely to judgment, and there is no oven instruction at all. What follows fills in the omissions rather than changing the proportions.
- The missing flour"Make just stiff enough to roll out" is the whole instruction. With two cups sugar, one cup butter and two eggs, expect roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour, added a half cup at a time until the dough stops sticking to the board. Stop as soon as it holds together; extra flour turns jumbles hard rather than crisp.
- Half a grated cocoanutA mature coconut yields about 3 to 4 cups of grated meat, so half is 1 1/2 to 2 cups. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut substitutes directly; sweetened flake will push an already very sweet dough over the edge.
- No leavening, by designNineteenth-century jumbles were often made flat and crisp with no saleratus or baking powder at all. If you want a softer cookie, a teaspoon of baking powder is a reasonable liberty, but the recipe as written is meant to bake thin and snap.
- OvenNo oven instruction is given here at all; jumbles of this period were generally baked in a quick oven. Set 375F and check at 8 minutes; thin rolled dough with this much sugar colors fast at the edges and is done when the rims are golden and the centers still look pale.
- Rolling thinChill the dough at least an hour before rolling. Butter-and-sugar doughs with fresh coconut in them are slack at room temperature, and the shredded coconut tears the sheet if you try to roll it under 1/8 inch.
- ShapeA jumble was traditionally a ring or a coil, cut with a doughnut cutter or rolled into a rope and joined end to end. Plain rounds work identically; nothing in the dough depends on the shape.
- YieldAbout four dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. They keep well in a tin for a few days but the fresh coconut means they will not hold for weeks the way a dry jumble does.
Jumbles are one of the oldest named cookies in English, appearing as "jumballs" in seventeenth-century receipt books as a stiff, sweet, often knotted or coiled paste flavored with rose water, caraway or anise; the origin of the name is obscure, though one conjecture among several links it to their twisted, gemel-ring shape rather than to any notion of jumbling ingredients together. By the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in 1877, the flavoring had drifted toward whatever a Midwestern pantry offered, and grated coconut was newly among those options: imported whole nuts had become cheap and common in American markets after the Civil War, and shredded coconut turns up all through late-century cookbooks in cakes, pies and small cakes. The attribution to Mrs. Ida M. Donaldson of Springdale is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by named housekeepers across several states, and it may explain the recipe's terseness: she was presumably writing for readers who had made jumbles a hundred times and needed only to be told what went into these ones.