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Jumbles (Pounds flour pounds sugar)
3 pounds flour. 2 pounds sugar. 1 pound butter. 8 eggs. 1 teaspoonful soda. A little milk if the eggs are not enough.--Mrs. M.E.
Jumbles.
Rub one pound butter into one and a quarter pound flour; beat four eggs with one and a quarter pound sugar, very light; mix well with the flour. Add one nutmeg and a glass of brandy.--Mrs. J.W.
Two separate jumble formulas printed as one entry, both given by weight and neither with a word about shaping or baking. Jumbles are a rolled or piped cookie, traditionally formed into a ring or coiled S, and baked hot and brief.
- Two recipes, not oneMrs. M.E.'s list ends at "a little milk"; Mrs. J.W.'s begins with "Rub one pound butter." Pick one and work it through — they are different doughs, the second richer in fat and flavoured with nutmeg and brandy.
- Weights into cups3 lb flour is about 11 cups, 2 lb sugar about 4 1/2 cups, 1 lb butter is four sticks. For the second recipe, 1 1/4 lb flour is roughly 4 1/2 cups and 1 1/4 lb sugar about 2 3/4 cups. Both make an enormous quantity; quartering is sensible.
- A glass of brandy"Glass" in receipts of this period is usually taken to mean a wineglass, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz or 1/4 cup. Anything much larger is more than the dough will carry.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons — a strong, deliberate flavour, not a pinch. Grate it fresh; pre-ground has lost most of its volatile oil.
- The sodaThe teaspoonful of soda in the first version needs an acid to work against, which is why the milk matters: use buttermilk or sour milk rather than sweet, or the soda may leave a soapy note. The second recipe has no chemical leavening; what lift it has comes from the eggs beaten very light with the sugar.
- ShapingNo shaping is given. Jumbles were commonly formed as rings or knots: roll the dough into pencil-thick ropes, cut in lengths, and join the ends into rings; or roll thin and cut with a doughnut cutter.
- Oven and timeThe receipt gives neither temperature nor time. A modern oven at 375F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges just colour, suits doughs this thin and sugar-heavy, which go from pale to burnt quickly; residual heat finishes the crisping on the sheet.
- Chill before rollingWith a pound of butter rubbed into the flour the dough will be slack at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it handle cleanly and keeps the rings from spreading into blobs.
- YieldThe full first recipe will give well over a hundred cookies. Baked crisp and kept airtight they hold for a couple of weeks.
Jumbles are a long-established English sweet biscuit, appearing in printed cookery by the sixteenth century under spellings including jumbal and jumball; the name has been variously explained, most often by reference to the ring or knot shape the dough was tied into, though the derivation is not settled. Older versions are frequently flavoured with rose water, caraway or aniseed, and in nineteenth-century American receipts such as Mrs. J.W.'s nutmeg and brandy are common instead. Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1877 by Marion Cabell Tyree, who gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers and set them down largely as received; the method of printing two contributors' receipts under one heading, each signed with initials, is typical of community-subscription cookbooks of the postwar South, and is why quantities arrive in pounds and instructions such as shaping and baking are simply assumed.