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Lemon Jumbles
1 egg. 1 teacupful sugar. 1/2 1/2 teacupful of butter. 3 teaspoonfuls milk. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. 2 small lemons; juice of two and grated rind of one. Mix rather stiff. Roll and cut out with a cake-cutter.--Mrs. W.
A short receipt of the kind written by a cook who already knew what jumbles looked like. Two things are missing: the flour and the oven, both of which the reader was expected to supply.
- The flour is not listed"Mix rather stiff" is the whole instruction. You are adding flour until the dough is firm enough to roll and hold a cut edge — roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups for this quantity of butter and sugar. Add it gradually and stop when the dough stops sticking to the board.
- TeacupfulA teacup in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 of a modern 8-ounce cup, not the measuring cup itself. Reading it at 3/4 cup gives about 3/4 cup sugar and 6 tablespoons butter; note that the recipe's proportion of twice as much sugar as butter holds whichever size of cup you assume.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis pair is the pre-baking-powder leavener: 1 teaspoon cream of tartar with 1/2 teaspoon soda works out at roughly 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder, though it acts all at once rather than in two stages. Sift them through the flour rather than dropping them into the wet mixture, or the cookies will streak and taste of soda.
- OvenNo temperature is given; home ranges of the period rarely had a usable thermometer and the cook judged the heat herself. A modern working suggestion is 375F for 8 to 10 minutes — out when the edges are set and just colouring, while the centres still look pale.
- LemonsUse about 3 tablespoons juice and the grated rind of one, as the receipt directs; more juice than that and the dough slackens and will not roll.
- Rolling and cuttingThe original says nothing about chilling, but half an hour in the refrigerator makes the dough easier to handle. Roll it out to about 1/4 inch.
- YieldAround three dozen cookies at a 2-inch cutter. They keep well in a tin and firm up further after a day.
Jumbles are one of the oldest sweet biscuits in English cookery, appearing in print by the sixteenth century. The name is often linked to the ring or knot shape the dough was originally tied into, and sometimes to gemel, a twinned or linked ring, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. By the later nineteenth century many jumble receipts, this one included, describe a rolled and stamped dough rather than a tied knot, with a stiff dough and a strong flavouring — lemon, rose water, caraway or nutmeg. The separate cream of tartar and soda place the receipt in the decades when packaged baking powder was available but home-mixed leavening was still in common use. Like much of Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled from Virginia contributors in the 1870s, the recipe arrives credited only to a contributor's initial, one of hundreds of such contributions.