Cookies
1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup butter and lard. 1 egg. Few gratings of nutmeg. Follow the directions for Jumbles; roll as thin as possible, and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. 1/4 cup milk Flour to make dough 2 teaspoons baking powder Sugar and cinnamon
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: the fat, sugar and egg come from the book's Jumbles recipe, and only the differences are listed here. Read the two together before starting.
- The ingredient list is a fragmentThe four lines given — 1/4 cup milk, flour to make dough, 2 teaspoons baking powder, sugar and cinnamon — are the adjustments to the Jumbles formula, not a complete list. Without the Jumbles page you have no butter, sugar or egg quantity, and the amounts cannot be reliably guessed.
- "Flour to make dough"This means adding flour until the dough is stiff enough to roll without sticking. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together; excess flour is what makes rolled cookies hard rather than crisp. The page gives no total, and none can be inferred without the Jumbles quantities.
- Chill before rolling"As thin as possible" is far easier after 30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator. Roll a portion at a time and keep the rest cold, or the butter softens and the sheet tears.
- Oven heatThe book assumes you know the setting. Thin rolled cookies want a fairly quick oven, 375–400°F, and 5 to 8 minutes; watch the edges rather than the clock, since a sheet this thin goes from pale to burnt quickly.
- The cinnamon sugarSprinkle it on before baking and press it in lightly with the rolling pin so it adheres. Roughly 1/4 cup sugar to 1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon is a workable ratio.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is within the normal modern range, though without the Jumbles flour quantity there is no way to check the proportion. Many baking powders of the period began working as soon as they were wetted, which is one reason such recipes urge getting the pans into the oven promptly.
- YieldDepends on the Jumbles base quantities, which this page does not give. Rolled thin and cut around 2 inches it will make several dozen. They keep well in a tin.
Jumbles are an old form in English-language cookery, appearing in early receipt books as "jumballs" — a stiff sugar-and-egg dough originally tied into knots or coiled into rings, which is often said to be the source of the name, from the Latin gemellus, twin, for the doubled loops, though the etymology is not settled. By the time this book was compiled, jumbles had become a plain rolled-and-cut cookie, and the dough functioned as a base formula that a cook varied by hand: add milk and cinnamon sugar. That is exactly what this page is, and it explains the abbreviated ingredient list.