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Oatmeal Jumbles
Two tablespoons melted butter, two well-beaten eggs, one and one-fourth cups sugar, three and one-half cups rolled oats, two tablespoons baking powder, one teaspoon vanilla, pinch of salt; bake slowly.
— Mrs. Mattice
A flourless drop cookie of the kind community cookbooks collected by the dozen: bound with egg and sugar alone, so the oats stay the whole point. The batter behaves nothing like a modern dough, and the leavening as printed needs a second look.
- The baking powder is almost certainly a misprintThe baking powder looks like a misprint — two tablespoons is six teaspoons, around three times what these proportions would normally take, and enough to leave a soapy, metallic bitterness. Two teaspoons is the likelier reading; with no flour to leaven, even that is generous.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven, conventionally around 300–325°F. With this much sugar and egg, a hot oven browns the outside before the centres set; check from about 15 minutes, until the edges are firm and pale gold.
- Rolled oats, not quick or steel-cutOld-fashioned rolled oats are what the receipt means and what the texture depends on. Quick oats absorb more and give a sandy, compact jumble; steel-cut will not soften at all.
- There is no flour, and that is deliberateThere is no flour in the receipt as printed. The eggs and sugar do the binding, which is why the mixture looks alarmingly loose at first.
- Let it standRest the mixture 10–15 minutes before shaping so the oats hydrate. Dropped straight from the bowl it spreads into lace.
- Shaping and panDrop by rounded teaspoons well apart on a parchment-lined sheet; the period cook would have used a greased tin. They spread and are fragile hot; let them firm on the sheet a minute before moving.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen small cookies. Two tablespoons of butter for that many is a very lean cookie by modern standards.
"Jumble" is one of the oldest surviving English cookie names, used since at least the seventeenth century for a small sweet cake, originally rolled into a rope and knotted or coiled — the name is often said to come from that twisting, though a derivation from a ring or gemel is a live competing account and neither is settled. By the time this receipt was written the word had loosened to mean almost any plain drop cookie, and the coiled shape was long gone. What dates it precisely is the rolled oats: steam-rolled oatmeal became a cheap, boxed pantry staple in American households only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and cooks promptly began putting it into cookies, puddings and bread. Contributed recipes like this one, signed with a neighbour's name, were the standard form of the community cookbook — sold to raise money for a church or society, and written for women who already knew what a slow oven felt like and needed only the proportions.