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Apricot Jumbles
Pour boiling water over the apricots and let them remain until they are soft, then remove the stones, and dry the fruit in a pan over the fire, or in an oven. Then beat it into a stiff paste with an equal weight of sugar, roll it into lengths, tie the lengths into knots, and preserve for use in a dry place. If it is wished, these jumbles may be coloured red by the addition of a little cochineal to the fruit pulp.
This is a fruit-paste confection rather than a biscuit, despite the name: dried apricots softened, cooked down, worked with sugar and shaped into knots. The whole thing hinges on driving off enough moisture that the paste keeps.
- Which apricotsThe recipe assumes dried apricots, which is why boiling water is poured over them to soften. The instruction to remove the stones points to unstoned dried fruit of the old sort; modern pitted dried apricots need only a soak in boiling water until pliable.
- Drying the fruit"Dry the fruit in a pan over the fire" means driving off moisture over low heat, stirring, until the fruit stiffens and pulls away from the pan; allow considerably more than a few minutes. The recipe names no oven temperature — use the lowest setting available, with the door slightly ajar.
- Equal weight of sugarWeigh the fruit after drying, not the dried fruit you started with, and match it with sugar. This ratio is high enough to preserve the paste; cutting it back will shorten how long it keeps.
- The hinge: drynessThe knots should be dry to the touch and leathery all through before storing, which may take a day or more spread out in a warm, airy place. Tackiness at the centre risks spoilage in the tin.
- Rolling and knottingDust the board and your hands with caster or icing sugar, roll pencil-thick ropes, and tie them while the paste is still warm and pliable — it stiffens quickly and will crack once cool.
- CochinealCochineal is the red colouring obtained from a scale insect; the refined pigment is sold as carmine and labelled E120. It is not vegan or vegetarian; beet powder is a plant-based alternative, though it behaves differently in heat and acid.
- Yield and storageStore them layered in sugar in an airtight tin, where they should keep for months.
"Jumble" in English cookery normally means a small hard sweet biscuit tied or twisted into a knot or a ring \em>gemel, a twin or double ring, describing the shape rather than the dough, though the origin of the word is in fact uncertain. The word has been borrowed here for a sugar paste, which places the recipe in the older tradition of "fruit pastes" and "leaches": stiff, sugar-saturated confections that were the standard way of keeping fruit through the winter before reliable jars. The technique is the same one that produces Spanish membrillo, French pâte de fruits and Turkish fruit leather, and it survived in English domestic books well into the late nineteenth century, when imported dried apricots from the Levant and later from California made the fruit available year-round to any household with a grocer.