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Jumbles (Pound flour pound butter pound)
1 pound flour. 3/4 pound butter. 1 pound sugar. 3 eggs. Flavor with mace. A delicious cake.--Mrs. A.T.
A proportion rather than a procedure: the book assumes any cook knows what to do with flour, butter, sugar and eggs. Here is what it leaves out.
- The weights in cups1 pound flour is about 3 1/2 cups spooned and levelled; 3/4 pound butter is 3 sticks (1 1/2 cups); 1 pound granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the whole recipe is a ratio.
- What a jumble isJumbles are a rolled or piped cookie, traditionally shaped into rings or coiled knots, not a loaf despite the recipe calling it "a delicious cake." Expect roughly five to six dozen from this quantity.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs and mace, then work in the flour last. The dough will be soft; an hour in the refrigerator makes it rollable to about 1/4 inch.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven at all. Bake at 350F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just coloured and the centres still pale. Many period jumble receipts call for a quick oven, but at this butter ratio they spread and brown fast, so the lower setting is safer.
- MaceMace is the outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, close to nutmeg in flavour but lighter and more delicate. Ground mace loses its perfume quickly; a teaspoon of fresh ground is about right for this batch, and nutmeg is the nearest substitute if you have none.
- Butter and saltButter of the period was often salted for keeping, though receipts for cakes and biscuits frequently call for fresh butter or for washing the salt out. If you use unsalted, about a teaspoon of salt worked into the flour keeps the cookies from tasting flat.
- Sugar textureLoaf sugar had to be broken and pounded before use, and the result could be coarser or finer than modern granulated depending on how far the pounding and sifting went. For a finer crumb, pulse the sugar briefly or use superfine, which creams more smoothly into so much butter.
Jumbles are a long-established English sweet, appearing in receipt books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as "jumballs" — stiff, often knotted or ring-shaped biscuits flavoured with rose water, caraway or mace. The name is sometimes traced to gemel, from Latin gemellus, "twin," a reference to the doubled or interlaced ring shape, though the origin is not settled. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was published in 1877 from contributed family receipts, the flavouring here had narrowed to mace, leaving what is essentially a rich butter cookie in near-pound proportions. The bare listing, with no method at all and signed only with initials, is typical of the book.