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Jumbles
2 cups sugar. 1 cup lard. 2 eggs. 1 cup sweet milk 1 teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cream of tartar Five Roses flour to mix stiff Lemon extract (optional).
Beat lard and sugar to a cream, and add the eggs. Dissolve the soda in milk and add the cream of tartar. Stir in flour till about as stiff as pound cake. Put plenty of flour on the board, and dip out the dough with a spoon. Flour rolling pin well and roll to about ¼ inch thick. Sprinkle sugar over top, cut out and bake in quick oven. When done, set on edge. The softer these jumbles are rolled out, the better they will be.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the sort that turns up in every community cookbook of the period. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so read the method before you shop.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for lard, sugar and eggs, but the ingredient list gives only the milk, soda and cream of tartar. There is no way to recover the original proportions honestly; a comparable jumble of the era runs roughly 1 cup fat, 2 cups sugar and 2 eggs to 1 cup milk, but that is a reconstruction, not this recipe.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the sour or buttermilk many recipes of the period specify. Whole milk is the right choice.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis pair stands in for baking powder. Dissolving the soda in the milk and adding the acid last means the leavening starts working immediately, so mix and roll without dawdling.
- LardLeaf lard gives a tender, slightly short crumb and very little flavour. Modern shortening behaves closest; butter will spread more and brown faster.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At a quarter inch thick these bake in about 6 to 8 minutes, and the edges colour before the centres look done. Watch them from the five-minute mark.
- "As stiff as pound cake"That is a thick, spoonable batter, not a kneadable dough — which is why the instruction is to dip it out with a spoon onto a heavily floured board. The closing line is the hinge: keep the dough as soft as you can still roll, and add flour to the board rather than to the bowl.
- Sugar before cuttingSprinkling sugar over the sheet and then cutting presses it into the surface, so it stays put in the oven. Coarse or granulated both work; sanding sugar holds its sparkle best.
- Setting on edgeStanding the hot cookies upright lets air reach both faces at once so they dry crisp instead of steaming soft on the pan. A cooling rack does the same job.
- YieldUsing the reconstructed proportions above, something on the order of four to five dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies; with the original quantities missing, this is only an estimate.
Jumbles are a long-lived English sweet, appearing in receipt books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as "jumbals" — a stiff sugar-and-egg paste that was often rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled into rings before baking. The name is usually linked to that twisted or twinned shape rather than to any ingredient, though the derivation is not settled. By the time this book was compiled the knot had been abandoned in most North American kitchens and a jumble simply meant a plain rolled sugar cookie, cut with a tin cutter and sugared on top. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and much of its contents came from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives — which explains the brand name written into the ingredient list. Why the lard, sugar and eggs are missing from that list is not recorded.