Jumbles
2 cups sugar 1 cup butter 2 eggs beaten separately 1 teaspoon vanilla Flour 2 tablespoons sour milk 3/4 teaspoon soda 3 Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs and part of the flour; then the milk, dissolving the soda in the milk. And sufficient flour to make a dough just stiff enough to roll thin. Cut in rings and bake in a moderate oven. 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter and lard 1 egg Few gratings of nutmeg
A plain rolled cookie of the old school, printed here with its ingredient list scattered around the method — a hazard of loose-leaf books, where the columns were meant to be read side by side. Read the quantities as a block before you start.
- A stray numeral in the ingredient listThe list still carries a bare "3" with no unit or ingredient attached, and it cannot be matched to anything in the method. The egg line reads "2 eggs beaten separately," which agrees with the instruction to add the eggs; beat the yolks in with the butter and sugar and fold the whites in at the end. Ignore the orphaned numeral.
- Flour is unmeasured by designThe instruction is to add "sufficient flour to make a dough just stiff enough to roll thin." With 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup fat and 2 tablespoons milk, expect somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups. Stop as soon as the dough stops sticking; more flour than that gives a hard, dry ring.
- Butter and lard"1/2 cup butter and lard" means half a cup total, the two mixed; the recipe does not say in what proportion. Lard gives tenderness and a short snap. All butter works and tastes better; all shortening spreads less.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to activate the soda. Substitute buttermilk, or 2 tablespoons of ordinary milk with a scant 1/4 teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left five minutes. Fresh sweet milk will leave the soda untriggered and the cookies faintly soapy.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, though "moderate" in books of this period covers about 350-375F. Thin-rolled jumbles are done in 8 to 10 minutes, when the edges are just tan; they colour fast and go bitter if pushed.
- Cut in ringsThe recipe calls for rings, though jumbles were also formed as knots and coils. Cut with a round cutter, then punch the centre with a thimble, a bottle cap or a small cutter. Roll the dough about 1/8 inch thick.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin and to lift the cut rings intact.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen rings from this quantity, depending on cutter size.
Jumbles are among the oldest continuously printed English-language cookies, appearing in early English receipt books as "jumbals" — a stiff, often rose-water-scented paste rolled into ropes and tied in knots or coiled into rings. The name is often said to derive from the knotted shape rather than from any jumbling of ingredients, though the origin is obscure. By the time this book was compiled the knot had simplified into a plain cut ring, the rose water had given way to vanilla and nutmeg, and chemical leavening had replaced long beating. The pairing of sour milk with soda is the signature of a period when households kept raw milk that clabbered on its own, and cooks treated that souring as a resource rather than a loss.