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Fruit Jumbles (No. 2)
1 quart Five Roses flour 1 pint granulated sugar 1 cup butter 4 eggs 4 tablespoons canned berry or cherry juice 1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 teaspoons baking powder.
This is one of the Five Roses book's shorthand entries: a proportion list with no method, on the assumption that the cook already knew what a jumble was and how to handle it. Everything below is about turning the list into a workable dough.
- The measuresA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb (450 g) sifted; a pint of sugar is 2 cups. The proportions are a stiff rolled cookie dough, not a batter.
- The hinge: keep the dough stiffJumbles are rolled and cut, so the four tablespoons of fruit juice are all the liquid the dough should get. If it feels sticky, chill it an hour rather than adding more flour, which makes the cookies dry and hard.
- Reconstructing the methodCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then the juice and cinnamon, then the flour and baking powder sifted together. Chill, roll about 1/4 inch thick, and cut.
- OvenNo temperature or method is given at all. For a modern oven, bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just set and lightly coloured; small cakes of this kind go from pale to overbaked quickly.
- Canned berry or cherry juiceMost likely the syrup drained from a jar of canned fruit, home-put-up or bought. The syrup from commercial canned cherries or the liquid strained from thawed frozen berries does the same job; so does a thinned seedless jam.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to four cups of flour is modest by modern standards, but the eggs do much of the lifting. Today's double-acting powder is stronger than some of what was sold when the book was compiled, so there is no need to increase it.
- ShapeA jumble was traditionally a ring or a coiled knot rather than a round. Cut with a doughnut cutter, or cut rounds and remove the centres, if you want the historically correct look.
- YieldExpect five to six dozen cookies from the full quantity, which is a large batch; the dough halves cleanly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and given away or sold cheaply to promote its flour; much of the content came from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, which explains the clipped, note-to-self style of entries like this one and the fact that there are numbered variants of the same cookie. Jumbles themselves are much older than the book: the name appears in English printed cookery as jumbal or jumball from the late sixteenth century, and is often said, though the derivation is far from settled, to come from a dough rolled into a rope and tied or coiled into a knot or ring before baking. By the early twentieth century North American jumbles had settled into a plain rolled sugar cookie, flavoured however the cook pleased, and the use of leftover canning syrup here is exactly the thrift you would expect from a household that put up its own fruit.