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Jumbles
3 eggs. 2 cups sugar. 3/4 cup butter or fat. 3 tablespoons sweet milk. 3 cups flour sifted with 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Roll thin, add more flour to keep from sticking, sprinkle with ground almonds and sugar and bake quickly.
A plain rolled cookie dough with almost no liquid — three tablespoons of milk for three cups of flour — so the eggs and butter do the binding. The hinge is thickness: rolled thin and baked hot and brief, or they turn into biscuits.
- "Bake quickly"Period usage points to a hot oven, roughly what we would call 400-425F, though the book gives no temperature. Thin jumbles at that heat will be done in only a few minutes; pull them when the edges have just colored, as they crisp further on the sheet.
- Roll thinAbout 1/8 inch. Chill the dough at least an hour first — with this much sugar and butter it is slack at room temperature, and the "add more flour to keep from sticking" instruction will toughen the cookies if you take it too far. Roll between sheets of parchment instead.
- Butter or fat"Fat" in Wilson's period most likely covers lard, beef drippings, or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Butter gives the better flavor; shortening gives a slightly crisper, paler cookie.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for in soda-leavened recipes. Ordinary whole milk.
- Cutting and toppingNo cutter or cutting step is given. A 2 to 2 1/2 inch round is a convenient modern choice; sprinkle the ground almonds and sugar onto the rolled sheet and press them in lightly with the rolling pin so they stay put in the oven.
- YieldUnstated, and it depends heavily on how thin the dough is rolled. Expect several dozen at 2 1/2 inches, which is a large batch by modern standards -- the dough halves cleanly.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to three cups of flour is on the sweet side. Reducing to 1 1/2 cups is an option if the modern palate objects.
Jumbles are a long-established English sweet, appearing in printed receipt books from the sixteenth century as "jumballs" — a stiff sugar-and-egg paste often flavored with rose water or caraway and, in the earliest versions, tied into knots or rings before baking. The name is generally traced to that knotted shape rather than to any jumbling of ingredients, though the etymology is disputed. By the time Mary A. Wilson was writing for Philadelphia newspaper readers around 1920, the knot had vanished and the jumble had settled into what this recipe describes: a thin rolled cookie, cheap in eggs and butter relative to its yield, finished with whatever nuts and sugar were at hand.