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Jumbles
Rub some lumps of sugar upon the rind of a fresh lemon. When dry crush them to powder, and with half a pound of sugar mix half a pound of fine flour, two eggs thoroughly whisked, and three ounces of dissolved butter. Make them up into a paste, and add, if required, a table-spoonful of thick cream. Drop the batter on buttered baking-tins from a spoon and bake in a slow oven for twenty minutes or more. The jumbles are done enough when crisp and lightly browned. Probable cost, 10d. The above ingredients are sufficient for about a dozen cakes.
A plain lemon drop cookie from the era before baking powder was universal — the only lift comes from the eggs. A few points make the difference between crisp jumbles and flat, greasy ones.
- Rubbing sugar on the rindDragging sugar lumps over a lemon until they turn yellow and oily is a period method of capturing the zest oil. Finely grated zest from one lemon, rubbed into the sugar with your fingertips, does the same job in a minute.
- WeightsHalf a pound of sugar and half a pound of flour are about 225 g each; three ounces of butter is 85 g. Victorian "fine flour" was not necessarily identical to modern all-purpose flour, so measure by weight rather than cups and stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.
- A slow ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 275-325°F (140-160°C). The low heat dries the biscuits through rather than colouring them quickly; the recipe still asks for them lightly browned as well as crisp.
- Dissolved butterThis means melted, not clarified. Let it cool to barely warm before it meets the whisked eggs, or you will scramble them and lose the aeration.
- The cream is a judgement callAdd the tablespoon of cream only if the mixture is too stiff to drop from a spoon. Sugar-heavy doughs spread as they warm, so err on the dry side and chill the mixture briefly if it slackens.
- Timing and donenessTwenty minutes at that temperature is a starting point; go by the description. They are ready when the edges are lightly browned and the surface no longer yields. They crisp further as they cool, so pull them while the centres still give slightly.
- Spacing and yieldThe recipe gives about a dozen cakes; smaller spoonfuls will yield more. Leave a good two inches between spoonfuls in case the mixture spreads. Parchment can be used in place of the buttered tins the recipe calls for.
- StorageKeep them in a tin with a tight lid. Their crispness is the whole point and it will not survive a humid kitchen overnight in the open.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously recorded English sweet biscuits, appearing in cookery manuscripts from the sixteenth century onward, often spelled "jumballs" or "iumbals". The earlier versions were stiff, aniseed- or rosewater-flavoured pastes rolled into ropes and tied into knots or rings, and the name is generally traced to that knotted shape, though the etymology has never been settled. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the late nineteenth century the knot had, at least in this instance, been set aside, and the jumble had become what this recipe describes: a rich drop cookie, flavoured with lemon rather than rosewater, relying on eggs and a slow oven rather than any chemical raising agent. The costing of tenpence is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every entry so a household manager could budget from the page.