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Chocolate Jumbles
2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, grated 1 tablespoon milk 2 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups flour and enough more flour to roll out.
Mix in the order given, toss on to a floured board, and roll to an inch in thickness. Cut out with a doughnut cutter. Just before putting into the oven, dust over with granulated sugar and bake ten minutes. See colored illustration, Plate XIII, opposite. 4 cup butter ½ cup powdered sugar
The ingredient list in this entry has been mangled in printing — the butter and sugar that should head the list have ended up at the tail. Read it as ¼ cup butter and ½ cup powdered sugar creamed together first, then the grated chocolate, milk, eggs, baking powder and flour in the order given.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was an unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in squares that were conventionally about an ounce each, so two squares is roughly 2 oz unsweetened chocolate. Grating rather than melting keeps the chocolate dry, which suits a stiff rolled dough; the book does not say why it is specified.
- Oven heatNo temperature or oven description is given in the recipe. For a modern oven, around 375F for the stated ten minutes is a reasonable starting point.
- "Roll to an inch in thickness"Far thicker than a modern cookie, and thicker than most period jumble recipes, which are usually rolled thin; whether the figure is as intended cannot be settled from the page. If you prefer a firmer cookie, roll to a half inch and check at seven or eight minutes.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of 1900 this usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match; confectioners' sugar will work but gives a softer, slightly pastier crumb.
- Doughnut cutterA ring cutter; period examples run roughly 2½ to 3 inches across with a center hole. Two nested round cutters do the same job.
- The dry doughWith only a tablespoon of milk for liquid, the eggs and butter carry everything. Add the extra rolling flour sparingly — enough to keep it from sticking and no more, or the cookies bake dry and tough.
- Sugar on topDust with granulated sugar just before baking, as directed. Applied earlier it draws moisture out and dissolves into a damp glaze.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 rings at 2½ inches, fewer if rolled the full inch.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it belongs to a whole genre of turn-of-the-century books issued by food firms to teach cooks new uses for a branded product — here the Premium chocolate squares named throughout the dessert chapters. Jumbles themselves are far older than the chocolate: the name appears in English cookery from the sixteenth century onward, generally associated with a stiff sweetened dough shaped into rings, knots or coils, and by the nineteenth century American books used "jumble" for a range of rolled cookies flavored with rose water, caraway, coconut or lemon. Grating baking chocolate into an existing family formula, rather than devising a new one, is characteristic of how a manufacturer's cookbook worked: take the recipe the reader already knows and put the product inside it.