Soft Jumbles
1 1/2 cups sugar 1 cup sour milk or cream 2/3 cup butter 1 teaspoon soda 3 cups Gold Medal flour 3 eggs Flavor to taste Drop by teaspoonfuls on greased tin and bake.
A terse early-1900s drop cookie: the book assumes you know how to cream butter and sugar, and it never mentions a temperature. Both gaps are easy to close.
- Oven temperature and timeNo heat is given. Drop cookies of this richness bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and just coloring. They should still look pale and soft in the center when they come out.
- Sour milkThis generally meant milk that had soured or clabbered on its own, something pasteurized milk does not do reliably. Use cultured buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The recipe also allows sour cream.
- Soda, not powderThe single teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk; that is the whole leavening system. If you substitute sweet milk the cookies will be flat and taste faintly soapy, so keep the acid.
- Mixing orderThe list is not the method. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, dissolve the soda in the sour milk, then add the liquid and the flour alternately. Stop as soon as the flour disappears.
- "Flavor to taste"Period jumbles were variously flavored with grated nutmeg, mace, caraway, lemon extract or rose water. Roughly 1 teaspoon extract, or 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg or mace, suits this quantity of dough.
- Greased tinA greased tin means a baking sheet, and butter or shortening was the grease. Parchment is easier and prevents the thin edges from sticking or overbrowning.
- A slack doughThree cups of flour against a cup of liquid, three eggs and 2/3 cup butter gives a soft batter-like dough that spreads. Chilling it 30 minutes keeps the cookies rounder; leave 2 inches between spoonfuls.
- YieldAbout 4 to 5 dozen cookies from teaspoon-sized drops, fewer if you use a heaped tablespoon.
Jumbles are an old English sweet, appearing in early receipt books as a stiff, often ring- or knot-shaped biscuit; the name is often said to derive from a twisted or interlaced form, though that etymology is contested, and older versions were rolled into coils and sometimes boiled before baking. By the time Gold Medal was issuing promotional cook books, the word had loosened to mean almost any plain, lightly spiced cookie, and "soft jumbles" signals the American drop-cookie form rather than the rolled one. The sour milk and soda are the tell of the period: before packaged baking powder was universal in home kitchens, cooks paired soured milk with soda, and flour-company booklets like this one printed such recipes to demonstrate what their particular flour would do.