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Cymbals
One cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, two eggs, one-half cup of sour milk, one-half nutmeg, one teaspoon of saleratus. Stir butter and sugar together, add eggs and a little flour. Stir in the milk and saleratus, which should be previously strained. Add flour to make stiff enough to roll out. Cut into rings, sift sugar on top, and bake in a quick oven.-Mrs Benjamin M. Page, Pasadena.
A rolled ring cookie of the jumble family, written for a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. The flour is left to judgment, and the leavening needs translating.
- Saleratus is baking sodaUse one teaspoon of baking soda. It reacts with the acid in the sour milk, which is why both appear together and why neither should be swapped out on its own.
- "Previously strained"Most likely this means dissolving the soda in the sour milk and straining the mixture before it goes into the batter, though the wording could equally refer to the milk alone. Nineteenth-century saleratus came in lumps that could otherwise leave bitter dark spots in the baked cookie; modern soda dissolves cleanly, but straining still guards against pockets.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Substitute buttermilk, or add about one and a half teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar to half a cup of whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- How much flour"Stiff enough to roll out" works out to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds together and pulls from the bowl; chilling it for an hour makes rolling far easier than working in extra flour.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly two to three teaspoons, so half is about a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is weaker and flatter; use a little more if that is what you have.
- A quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'quick oven' is generally taken to mean somewhere around 400F to 450F. For a thin rolled cookie set the oven at 400F and check at 7 minutes. They are done when the edges color and the tops are still pale.
- Cutting the ringsRoll about a quarter inch thick and cut with a doughnut cutter, or a round cutter with a smaller one for the center. The ring shape is the point of the recipe, not decoration.
- Sugar on topSift the sugar over the cut rings before baking so it sets into the surface. Granulated works; the instruction to sift may point to a finer sugar, and coarse sanding sugar gives a better crust if you have it.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies from a two-and-a-half-inch cutter. They keep a week in a tin and firm up considerably as they cool.
"Cymbal" is one of the many spellings that nineteenth-century American cookbooks gave to the jumble, or jumbal, a rolled sugar cookie shaped into a ring or a knot. The origin of the word is not settled -- it is often traced back through jumbal to earlier English ring-shaped sweet biscuits, and the respelling as "cymbal" is usually explained, though not documented, as a later association with the ring-shaped instrument. By the later nineteenth century the sour-milk-and-saleratus combination was common in household baking, soda and clabbered milk doing work that commercial baking powder would increasingly take over. The attribution to Mrs Benjamin M. Page of Pasadena marks this as a contributed recipe, the sort collected from readers and local subscribers, and the flour is left to the baker's judgment.