Jumbles
Cream 1/2 of a cupful of butter, add 1 cupful of sugar and cream again. Add I well-beaten egg, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla or other flavoring, 1/2 of a cupful of sour cream, into which has been sifted 1/2 of a teaspoonful of soda and well stirred; lastly, about 2½ cupfuls of sifted flour.
The mixture should be a very soft dough. Drop by small teaspoonfuls four inches apart on greased pans and bake in a slow oven.
A plain sour-cream drop cookie from a thrift cookbook, leavened entirely by the reaction of soda with the acid in the cream. A few of the figures are garbled by old type and need reading before you start.
- The mangled numbersEvery capital "I" in the text is the numeral 1: one cupful of sugar, one egg, one teaspoonful of vanilla. "12 of a teaspoonful of soda" is 1/2 teaspoon, matching the 1/2-cup measures elsewhere in the line.
- Sour cream means souredThe original assumes thick naturally soured cream, acidic enough to react with the soda. Modern cultured sour cream works directly; sweet heavy cream will not, and the cookies will taste flat and faintly soapy.
- OvenA slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 300 to 325F, which suits a large loaf but tends to leave small drop cookies pale and dry by the time they set. Bake at 325 to 350F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges just color.
- Flour by weightThe 2 1/2 cupfuls are sifted before measuring, so roughly 10 oz / 285 g. Add the last half cup gradually and stop while the dough is still slack enough to drop from a spoon.
- Four inches apartNot caution but instruction: a very soft dough spreads widely into thin, crisp-edged rounds. Crowding the pan gives one sheet of cookie.
- Chilling helpsIf the dough is too loose to drop cleanly, half an hour in the refrigerator firms the butter, though a colder dough will spread somewhat less.
- YieldSmall teaspoonfuls spaced four inches apart will need several sheets; yield varies with how large a spoonful you drop. Best eaten within a few days.
Jumbles are an old English sweet, appearing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century receipt books as a stiff, often knotted or ring-shaped biscuit flavored with rose water, aniseed or caraway; the name is often traced to the ring form, sometimes linked to the old word gemel, a twin ring, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled and the origin is generally treated as uncertain. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American household manuals jumbles appear both as shaped rings and as dropped cookies, and the flavoring had commonly shifted to vanilla or lemon. The version here is a plain one: no baking powder, no milk, half a cup of butter, and a half cup of sour cream doing the work of both liquid and leaven -- one use for cream that had turned in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration.