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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Cream
WALNUT WAFERS Cream one cupful of butter with one and one-half cupfuls of sugar; add three beaten eggs; put two cupfuls of chopped walnut meats into one cupful of flour, and add this to the batter. Sift one teaspoonful of baking-powder and one and one-half cupfuls of flour together, and add at the last. Drop by spoonfuls on buttered tins, dust with granulated sugar, and put a whole walnut meat on each one. Bake them in a moderate oven.
PEANUT JUMBLES Take two tablespoonfuls of butter, one cupful of sugar, one egg, half a teaspoonful of soda, one teaspoonful of cream of tartar, one tablespoonful of milk, and flour enough to make a soft dough. Roll thin and cut with a jumble cutter, brush over with beaten egg and cover lightly with chopped peanuts. Bake separately the small rounds cut from the center. COCOANUT JUMBLES Beat half a cupful of butter and half a cupful of sugar to a cream, flavor with a teaspoonful of vanilla, then add two eggs, a cupful of freshly grated cocoanut, and two cupfuls of flour sifted with a level teaspoonful of baking-powder. Pat and roll out thin on a well-floured board, adding more flour if needed. Flour a jumble cutter well and cut into rings. Brush the tops of the cakes with milk and sprinkle with a mixture of granulated sugar and cocoanut. Place far enough apart on buttered pan so that they will not touch when baked. Bake in a rather hot oven until a pale brown. FRUIT ROCKS Cream one cup of sugar with two-thirds cup of butter, add one and a half cupfuls of flour, two eggs, one cupful of English walnut meats, one cupful of chopped raisins, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, one teaspoonful of cream of tartar and one-half teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little water. Drop by teaspoonfuls on buttered tins an inch or more apart. Press one-half of an English walnut meat or a raisin in the center of each, and bake until a nice brown.
RAISIN SPIRALS Take one cup of sugar, one-half cupful of butter and yolks of two eggs, and beat to a cream. Add-one cupful of sour milk and one cupful of chopped raisins; one-half teaspoonful each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Dissolve one teaspoonful of soda in a little of the milk. Just before putting in the flour add the beaten whites of two eggs. Make a very stiff dough and cut into thin strips about five inches long. Roll around the finger and fry in butter a delicate brown.
Five drop-and-rolled cookies from the era before standardised leavening, written for cooks who judged dough by feel. The chief work of translation is oven temperature, pan lining, and the soda/cream-of-tartar pairs that predate reliable baking powder.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate" is usually taken as about 350F, for the walnut wafers and fruit rocks; "rather hot" for the cocoanut jumbles as roughly 400F, watched closely since coconut and sugar on top will colour first. No times are given in the originals; the fruit rocks and jumbles are to be baked to a brown or pale brown, so judge by colour, checking from about ten minutes.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the period equivalent of roughly two teaspoons of modern baking powder. In the raisin spirals the soda works against the sour milk instead, so keep genuinely soured milk or use buttermilk; with sweet milk the dough will be flat and may carry a taste of unreacted soda.
- A jumble cutterA ring cutter that stamps a doughnut shape in one press. Two plain round cutters, one about 2.5 inches and one about 1 inch, do the same job; the peanut jumbles recipe assumes you will bake the centre rounds as separate small cookies.
- Flour "enough to make a soft dough"For the peanut jumbles this lands around 1.75 to 2 cups. Add it in stages until the dough just holds together and rolls without sticking; more than that and the jumbles bake hard rather than short.
- Walnut wafers, the hingeTossing the chopped nuts in a cup of flour before they go into the batter keeps them suspended in the mixture. Do not skip it or fold the nuts in dry, and leave a couple of inches between spoonfuls in case they spread.
- Buttered tinsParchment on a heavy sheet is more reliable than butter alone for all of these, especially the sugar-dusted wafers, where butter on bare metal encourages the edges to catch and stick.
- Fresh coconutFreshly grated coconut is moist and unsweetened. Frozen grated coconut, thawed and drained, is the closest substitute; sweetened desiccated coconut will make the jumbles noticeably sweeter and drier, so cut the sugar slightly if you use it.
- Frying the raisin spiralsButter alone scorches long before the dough cooks through. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, held at 350-360F gives the delicate brown intended; fry a test strip first, as a too-cool fat leaves them greasy and raw at the centre.
- YieldNone of the recipes states a yield; it will depend on how thin the dough is rolled or how large the spoonfuls, but expect a few dozen small cookies from each.
Jumbles are among the oldest named cookies in English, appearing in seventeenth-century receipt books as "jumballs" — stiff spiced dough knotted or coiled into rings; the ring-shaped jumble cutter is plausibly a descendant of that shape. By the time this book was written the name meant simply a thin rolled cookie with a hole, and the flavourings had shifted to the industrial-age pantry: cheap shelled peanuts, imported coconut, walnut meats sold by the pound. "Rocks" is an American term for a rough, craggy drop cookie stiff with fruit and nuts, current by the late nineteenth century. Soda paired with cream of tartar appears in two of these recipes, the peanut jumbles and the fruit rocks, while two others call for baking powder outright — old and new leavening sitting side by side on the same pages.