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Jumbles (One and a half cups white)
One and a half cups white sugar, three-fourths cup butter, three eggs, three table-spoons sweet milk, half tea-spoon soda and one of cream tartar; mix with sufficient flour to roll; roll and sprinkle with sugar; cut out and bake. - Mrs. Mollie Pilcher, Jackson, Mich.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the kind every nineteenth-century household kept on hand. The recipe assumes you know how stiff a rolled dough should be, and gives neither oven heat nor time.
- Flour is the judgement call"Sufficient flour to roll" is genuinely open-ended; expect somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2 cups, added until the dough is firm enough to handle but not dry. Stop as soon as it stops sticking — extra flour here makes the jumbles hard rather than short.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with one of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Sift both into the flour rather than dissolving the soda in the milk, or the leavening will spend itself before the dough is rolled.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period call for. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Oven heatNo temperature or time is given at all. As a modern working guess for thin rolled cookies, try around 375F and check at 8 to 10 minutes, pulling them when the edges just colour, since they firm as they cool.
- Sugar on the dough, not afterThe recipe sprinkles sugar on the rolled sheet before cutting, so it bakes into the surface rather than sitting loose on a finished cookie. Pressing it in lightly with the rolling pin helps it stay put.
- ShapeJumbles were traditionally cut as rings or coiled ropes joined end to end, though this recipe only says "cut out"; a doughnut cutter or two concentric rounds suits the older form. Rolled about 1/4 inch thick, the quantity should give several dozen, depending on cutter size.
- ButterFarm butter of this period was often salted for keeping, so the recipe's silence on salt may assume it. If using unsalted butter, adding about half a teaspoon of salt is reasonable.
Jumbles are among the oldest continuously made English-language cookies, appearing in printed receipt books from the sixteenth century onward, and the name is often traced, though the origin of the word remains uncertain, to gemel or jumbal, meaning a twin or double ring — said to be a reference to the knotted and coiled shapes the dough was worked into. Early versions were flavoured with rosewater, caraway or almond and were closer to a hard, dry biscuit meant to keep for weeks. By the time Buckeye Cookery collected this contribution from Mrs. Pilcher of Jackson, Michigan in the 1870s and 80s, the jumble had simplified into a household sugar cookie, leavened with the soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing that stood in for commercial baking powder.