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Jumbles
One and one-half cups of sugar, one cup of butter, two eggs, one small teaspoon of soda dissolved in two tablespoons of cold water; flour enough to roll out; cut out thin.
— Miss Kate Casey
A bare-bones rolled cookie of the sort every community cookbook carried, written for a cook who already knew what jumble dough should feel like. The gaps are flour quantity, oven heat and time, all of which you supply yourself.
- Flour enough to roll outWith this ratio of fat, sugar and egg, expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and is no longer tacky; extra flour past that point makes the cookies dry and hard rather than crisp.
- Chill before rollingA cup of butter with only two eggs and two tablespoons of soda water for moisture gives a soft dough at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes "cut out thin" possible without working in more flour.
- How thin is thinRoll to about 1/8 inch. At that thickness they bake crisp all the way through; a quarter-inch dough gives a softer, cakier result.
- Oven and timeNo heat is given because the receipt assumed a home baker's judgment. A moderate oven, 350F, for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colored. Thin cookies go from pale to burnt quickly, so watch the second tray.
- The sodaOne small teaspoon is a scant teaspoon of what a period cook might also call saleratus, dissolved in cold water so it distributes evenly. There is no acid ingredient here, so the soda works mostly for spread, browning and tenderness rather than real lift. Do not increase it or the cookies take on a soapy edge.
- ButterNineteenth-century butter was often lightly salted farm butter of variable water content. Use salted butter, or add 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the flour; unsalted butter alone leaves these cookies flat-tasting.
- YieldDepending on how thin you roll, roughly six to eight dozen cookies from a 2 1/2-inch cutter. They keep well in a tin for a week.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously baked English cookies, appearing in early receipt books as "jumballs" — a stiff sugar-and-egg paste that was rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled into rings, which is generally taken as the source of the name. By the time this version was written down the knotting had mostly been abandoned in favor of a rolled-and-cut round, and the dough had picked up chemical leavening; soda in water was the standard household shortcut before baking powder became cheap and reliable. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of community cookbooks, where contributors wrote for readers who needed only the proportions, not the method.