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Fruit Jumbles (No. 1)
1½ cups white sugar ½ cup butter 1 pound chopped dates ¼ pound chopped walnuts 3 cups Five Roses flour 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon soda (dissolved).
Stir butter and sugar together, then add the beaten eggs. Add flour, fruit and vanilla, and last of all the soda. The dough should be very stiff. Dip spoon into hot water and spread each spoonful into the shape of cake.
A stiff drop cookie from the era before baking powder had entirely displaced soda, and before recipes bothered to state an oven temperature. Two things need filling in: the heat and the soda.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. Bake at 375F for 10-12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly coloured; the centres should still look soft. Anything hotter scorches the dates before the dough sets.
- "Soda (dissolved)"Dissolve the teaspoon of baking soda in about a tablespoon of hot water and add it last, as directed, then get the trays into the oven promptly. There is no acid ingredient here beyond whatever is in the dates, so the soda is doing more browning and tenderising than lifting.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, then as now. Ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute; three cups is roughly 13-14 oz / 375-400 g.
- SaltNone is listed, and the butter of the period was usually salted. Use salted butter, or add a scant half teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- A pound of datesThat is a full 450 g, pitted weight, and it dominates the dough. Modern pitted dates are generally softer and stickier than the pressed slabs sold at the time; chop them with a lightly oiled knife and toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they separate.
- ShapingThe hot-water trick is the hinge of the recipe. The dough is too stiff to drop and spread on its own, so dip the spoon in hot water between each cookie and press each mound out into a round about 2½ inches across. Rewet the spoon every time or it drags.
- TraysGrease the sheets lightly or use parchment. With this much fruit sugar the bottoms stick readily.
- YieldAbout four dozen cookies of the size described. They keep well for several days in a tin and firm up as they cool.
"Jumble" is one of the oldest cookie names in English, recorded from the sixteenth century for a small sweet cake often rolled into a rope and knotted or coiled into a ring; the name has sometimes been linked to gemel, a doubled or twinned thing, describing that looped shape, though the origin is not settled. By the time the Five Roses Cook Book was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, the knot had been abandoned entirely and a jumble simply meant a plain drop cookie, distinguished from its neighbours in the chapter by what was stirred into it -- hence "fruit," and hence the numbered variants. The heavy hand with dates and walnuts is characteristic of the period: dried dates were sold in Canadian groceries in pressed slabs and were a cheap source of sweetness and bulk for a home baker, which is why a single batch of cookies could reasonably call for a whole pound of them.