Fruit Jumbles
1 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated nutmeg 3 eggs 10 ounces flour) 1/2 pound seeded raisins or currants Stir the butter and sugar to a cream; add the lemon and a little grated nutmeg; then the eggs beaten separately, then the flour, leaving out a tablespoonful to mix with the fruit. Have the fruit well washed and drained; mix with the flour and add to the batter. Drop on buttered tins and bake.
The ingredient list as printed is truncated — butter and sugar are called for in the method but their quantities are missing, as is the closing of the bracket after the flour. Anything you make from this page involves reconstructing those amounts.
- The missing butter and sugarThe method begins "stir the butter and sugar to a cream" but neither appears with a quantity. For a jumble built on 10 ounces of flour and 3 eggs, something in the region of half a pound each of butter and sugar would not be out of place, but this is inference, not what the book says.
- Weigh the flour10 ounces is about 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons of modern all-purpose flour, scooped and levelled. Period flour was softer and less uniform, so weighing rather than measuring by cup gets you closer to the intended dough.
- No oven temperature is givenDrop cakes of this type belong in a 375F oven for 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges have coloured and the centres are just set. The book assumed a cook who judged a wood or coal oven by hand and gave no number at all.
- Flouring the fruitThe tablespoon of flour held back and tossed with the raisins is the one instruction that matters. It keeps the fruit suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of each cake, and it keeps damp, freshly washed fruit from streaking the batter.
- Dry the fruit properly"Well washed and drained" means genuinely dry — blot the raisins or currants on a towel. Wet fruit slackens the dough and the cakes spread into each other on the sheet.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means whites and yolks beaten apart, yolks into the creamed butter and the whipped whites folded in at the end. It gives a lighter cake than beating the eggs whole, which is the shortcut most modern cookies take.
- Buttered tinsParchment on a flat sheet does the same job with less risk of the sugary undersides catching. Leave two inches between drops; these spread.
- YieldYield depends on the butter and sugar you supply, since the book gives neither; on the proportions suggested above, expect three or four dozen cakes of about a tablespoon each at least, and possibly more. They firm up considerably on the first day.
- Nutmeg"A little grated" is about a quarter teaspoon from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg is much flatter and you will want a touch more of it.
Jumbles are one of the oldest surviving English cake names, recorded from the sixteenth century onward as a stiff, sweet, often ring-shaped or knotted biscuit — the name is generally traced to the practice of tying or coiling the dough, though the etymology has never been settled. By the time this recipe was set down, the jumble had drifted from a moulded ring to a drop cake, and the difference between a jumble, a cooky and a small cake had largely collapsed into a matter of house tradition. The lemon-and-nutmeg flavouring here is thoroughly conservative, a seasoning pair long established in English small cakes before it reached an American collection.