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Chocolate Jumbles
4 cups flour, 1 cup washed butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoonful soda, 3/4 tablespoonful hot water.
Work butter into flour, using the tips of the fingers. Beat eggs until light and add sugar, gradually, continuing the beating. Combine mixtures and add soda dissolved in water. Mixture should now be of the right consistency to roll, but if a bit too stiff, add a small quantity of milk. Toss on a slightly floured board and pat and roll to one-eighth inch in thickness. Shape with a fancy cutter, first dipped in flour. Put on a buttered tin, and bake in a moderate oven. Cool and spread with
A plain rolled sugar cookie meant to be finished with chocolate — the text breaks off mid-sentence at the icing, so that part has to come from elsewhere. Everything up to the cutter is complete and workable.
- Washed butterButter kneaded under cold water to force out residual buttermilk and salt, which was done for keeping quality and to control seasoning. Unsalted butter, well chilled, is the modern equivalent; no washing needed.
- The soda has nothing to react withA teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water, with no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar in the dough, will not leaven much. It raises the pH, which encourages browning and spread and gives the faint alkaline tang characteristic of old jumbles. Half that amount reads cleaner to modern palates.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 350F. At one-eighth inch these are thin; check at 7 to 8 minutes and pull them when the edges just colour.
- Working the butter inRubbing cold butter into the flour with the fingertips, rather than creaming it with sugar, is what makes a jumble crisp and short rather than cakey. Keep the butter cold and stop while the mixture is still crumbly.
- 3/4 tablespoonfulAn odd measure, but literal: a little over two teaspoons of hot water, just enough to dissolve the soda.
- RollingThe dough will be stiff and slightly crumbly. Chilling it an hour makes an eighth-inch roll far easier; add milk only a teaspoon at a time, as too much makes the cookies tough.
- The missing finishThe page ends at 'spread with'. The finish was presumably a chocolate one: melted Baker's chocolate, or a glaze of grated chocolate, sugar and hot water beaten smooth. Any thin chocolate icing suits; spread it on cooled cookies and let it set.
- YieldFour cups of flour rolled thin gives roughly five to six dozen small cookies, depending on the cutter.
Choice Recipes was one of a long line of pamphlets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the oldest chocolate firm in the United States, to persuade households to cook with its baking chocolate rather than only drink it; the recipes were solicited from well-known cooking-school teachers of the day, and the phrasing here — "toss on a slightly floured board," "shape with a fancy cutter, first dipped in flour" — is the house style of the Boston Cooking School and reads as an echo of Fannie Farmer. The jumble itself is much older than the pamphlet: the name is generally traced to a ring- or knot-shaped cookie recorded in English cookery from the sixteenth century onward, sometimes spelled "jumbal," and by the nineteenth century it had become in America any thin, crisp, rolled sugar cookie, ring or otherwise. Adding a chocolate coating was the pamphlet's commercial angle, and its point.