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Cocoanut Orange Jumbles
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 large egg, beaten 1 orange, grated rind 1/3 cup orange juice 3 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Beat butter and sugar until creamy, add egg, orange rind and juice, flour sifted with baking powder and stir in cocoanut. Roll out in a thin sheet, cut into circles with a doughnut cutter, set these a little distance apart in greased baking tins; brush top of each jumble with slightly beaten white of egg, sprinkle with Dromedary Cocoanut; dredge with granulated sugar, and bake in a quick oven to a pale yellow color.
A thin rolled cookie from a brand pamphlet, written for cooks who owned a doughnut cutter and judged an oven by feel. The instructions are sound; only the units, the oven and the coconut need translating.
- Pale, not brownThe hinge is the finish: "a pale yellow color." Sugar on top and coconut on top both scorch, so pull the pans while the rings are barely blond at the edges and still soft in the middle. They crisp as they cool.
- A quick ovenPeriod oven tables put a quick or hot oven somewhere around 400-450F. For cookies rolled genuinely thin, 425F for 6 to 9 minutes is a workable starting point; check the first pan at 6 minutes and adjust.
- Dromedary CocoanutDromedary sold moist shredded coconut in tins, finer and wetter than most modern bags. Sweetened flake works; run it briefly through a food processor so the shreds are short enough to lie flat on a thin cookie. Unsweetened desiccated coconut gives a drier, less tender result.
- The leaveningFour teaspoons of baking powder to three cups of flour is a little above the usual modern rate of about a teaspoon per cup. If you find the cookies puffier than you want, cut it back slightly.
- No salt listedNo salt is called for, and butter of this period was commonly salted. If you use unsalted butter, sift about 1/4 teaspoon of salt in with the flour.
- Rolling a slack doughWith butter, egg and a third of a cup of juice, the dough is soft. Chill it at least an hour, roll it in two batches on a well-floured board to about 1/8 inch, and keep the scraps cold between re-rollings.
- Doughnut cutterThe recipe cuts rings. Any 2 1/2-inch cutter plus a small cutter or bottle cap for the center does the job.
- Egg white washBrush lightly and sparingly, then coconut, then a dredge of granulated sugar. Too much white pools in the hole and sets glassy.
- YieldSeveral dozen 2 1/2-inch rings, depending on how thin you roll and how much you re-roll the trimmings.
Jumbles are a long-lived English cookie type, appearing in early receipt books as thin sweet pastes flavored with rose water, caraway or almond and shaped into knots or rings; the name is often traced to gemel, a twin or double ring, though the derivation is not settled. By the time this pamphlet was issued the dough had become a plain American rolled cookie, and the point of the recipe was to sell coconut: Dromedary was a grocery brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for tinned moist shredded coconut, and its little recipe books existed to show housekeepers how many ways a single tin could be used.