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Fourth Day: Jumbles
One cup sugar, two do. flour, one do. milk, one heaping tablespoonful butter, one small teaspoon soda and two of cream tartar, one egg, one-half teaspoonful mixed cinnamon and cloves. Half a cup of seeded raisins improves it. No. 43-RING JUMBLES.
One pound butter, one do. sugar, one and a quarter of flour, four eggs. Two tablespoonfuls of any kind of flavoring, or a small wineglass of rosewater. Cream the butter, add the sugar, then the yolks of eggs, then half the flour, then the whites, then the rest of the flour, stirred lightly. Cut out with a tumbler or cake-cutter, and from the middle of each, with a smaller cutter or the top of a canister, cut a round hole. Bake quickly, and sift fine sugar over them as soon as they are done.
No. 44-PLAIN JUMBLES.
One egg, one cup sugar, one-half do. butter, three teaspoonfuls milk, one do, cream tartar, one-half do. soda. No. 45-LEMON JUMBLES.
The above recipe, with the juice and rind of one large lemon, or the juice of two and the grated rind of one. "There!" said Aunt Jane, when the last one had been written down, "I think I have given you occupation for a long time-that is, if you make up all these good things. Which do you mean to begin on? " "Oh, please let us make ginger-snaps and some one other kind, and we'll all help each other. Tell us some kind of nice cookies." "You might better take something that is not to be rolled out, as there is but one rolling-board and pin. Suppose you try Tudor cake? The materials are not expensive, and if you spoil them there will not be much lost." "Now, Aunt Jane, that's too bad! We're not going to spoil anything! Just examine us and see if we don't know how to put cake together!" "Well, take that recipe, and tell me how you would go to work." "First, we'll rub the butter to a cream, then stir in the sugar, then the yolks of eggs; (while one has been mixing it, the others have been beating the eggs, you know,--) then the milk and part of the flour; then-" "No," said her aunt; "you've left out something." "Oh, yes; first you measure the cream tartar and sift it with the flour; then you put the whites of the eggs, then the soda, carefully dissolved in warm water, and poured off without the dregs; then the rest of the flour, and then you bake it." "Very well indeed, and you musn't forget to line your cake-pan with buttered paper if you want the cake very delicate, though it is not absolutely necessary. And you must always warm the pan or cake-tins first. Now tell me how you'll set about the ginger-snaps." "Oh, that's easy. Let me see-no eggs; I'll take lard, because that's easiest; set it near the fire to soften, stir in the sugar, and then the molasses and ginger; dissolve the soda in warm water and put it into the sour milk, and stir them in; and then just keep stirring in flour until you think you can roll it out." "When it gets too hard to stir with the spoon, you may mix it with your hand," said Aunt Jane. "But don't get in too much flour; it wants to have just as little as possible; and don't forget to flour the pie-board." "Why do you say 'softened' butter, Mamma, in some of these receipts?" asked Amy. "Because you never really melt butter for cake, even quite common cake; that is, you don't let it turn to oil. The nicest way is to set the cup or bowl with it in, into a pan of boiling water, and then it softens enough to have the sugar stirred into it, which is the main thing. For the more delicate kinds of cake, butter must be rubbed to a cream, either with a wooden spoon or with the hand." "It seems to me nearly every thing has the juice and rind of a lemon in it," said Mabel. "Fresh lemons are a great addition to cake," said Aunt Jane, "but you musn't make the mistake of flavoring every thing alike. There are some houses where all their cakes and custards and puddings taste alike, though they have a variety of recipes, because they make every thing with lemon, or nutmeg, or cinnamon, or whatever their taste may incline them to. For instance, I would never put lemon into any two things to be eaten at the same meal. You can have vanilla, or bitter almond, or rose water, or, what is often best, no flavoring at all." "There is one condition I must positively make," said Mrs. Vernon, as the impatient cooks left the dinner table. "I can not have Rhoda come back from her 'afternoon out' to find a disorderly kitchen and a great pile of dishes and pans to be washed. If you work in her nice, clean kitchen, you must clear up all traces of yourselves before she comes back." "Oh, yes, we will," said all at once, and they did it, too, for they knew that if they failed to keep their part of the agreement they would not enjoy the privilege another time. So as soon as Rhoda had washed the dishes and "tidied up," as she called it, in the kitchen, thev took possession of her dominions and set to work, after a parting caution from Aunt Jane as to the prime necessity of clean hands and nails.
We need not follow them through the afternoon's operations, which were quite successful, and produced a great dish full of nice ginger-snaps, and two flat, thin pansful of cake. Then they washed the utensils they had used, scraped the flour from the pie-board, and wiped it from the table without spilling any on the floor except a little dusting of it, which was easily disposed of with a broom, and put every article back into its place. "Why, bless ye, honey," said Rhoda, when Mrs. Vernon asked her about it in the evening, "you wouldn't never have knowed they'd been there at all!"
Three jumble recipes in the terse shorthand of an 1870s household book, wrapped in a lesson scene. Two of them omit the flour entirely, on the assumption that a cook knows to add it until the dough rolls.
- "do." means dittoThe abbreviation carries the unit from the preceding item. "One cup sugar, two do. flour" is two cups of flour; "one pound butter, one do. sugar" is one pound of sugar.
- Soda and cream of tartar are baking powderCommercial powder existed by this date but was not universally used or trusted, and household books still called for the two mixed at home. The working ratio is roughly one part soda to two parts cream of tartar, and the soda can be replaced by about four times its own volume in modern baking powder: for ½ teaspoon soda plus 1 teaspoon cream tartar, use about 2 teaspoons baking powder. Sift the cream of tartar with the flour and dissolve the soda separately, as Aunt Jane insists -- her instruction to pour it off "without the dregs" indicates soda that did not always dissolve clean.
- The missing flourNos. 44 and 45 list no flour at all. A rolled jumble dough on one egg, one cup sugar and half a cup butter takes roughly 2 to 2½ cups; add it gradually and stop when the dough just holds together, since these cookies toughen quickly with extra flour.
- Ring jumbles, and a doubtful measure"One and a quarter of flour" is ambiguous. Read against a pound of butter, a pound of sugar and four eggs, 1¼ pounds of flour (about 4½ cups) gives a very rich, soft dough that wants chilling before it will take a cutter; 1¼ pints or cups is too little to roll at all. Treat the pound-scale version as a large batch and halve it for a household.
- A quick ovenThe recipe says only "bake quickly"; something in the region of 400 to 425F. Jumbles are thin and sugar-heavy; at that heat they set in well under ten minutes and should come out pale at the centre with barely coloured edges.
- Rosewater and the wineglassA small wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces. Modern rosewater may well be more concentrated than the distilled article of the 1870s -- start with a tablespoon. "Two tablespoonfuls of any kind of flavoring" likewise suggests weaker homemade extracts; a teaspoon or two of modern vanilla is plenty.
- Softened, not melted butterThe instruction in the dialogue is the hinge of every one of these recipes. Butter that has turned to oil will not hold air when the sugar goes in, and the cookies spread flat and greasy. Warm the bowl in hot water only until the butter is plastic.
- Sift sugar while hotThe fine sugar dusted over the ring jumbles the moment they leave the oven melts slightly into the surface and sets as a thin glaze. Done cold, it simply falls off.
- Cutting the ringsA tumbler and a canister lid stand in for a doughnut cutter. Any two round cutters of about 2½ inches and 1 inch will do; re-roll the centres with the scraps.
Jumbles are one of the oldest surviving English cookie forms, appearing in seventeenth-century receipt books as "jumbals" — stiff sweetened dough rolled into ropes and knotted or coiled into rings, often flavoured with rosewater, aniseed or caraway. The origin of the name is obscure; one conjecture among several links it to gemel, the doubled or twinned ring, which would fit the shape, though the folk etymologies about jumbled ingredients have their advocates too. By the time this book was written the knotting had given way to a tumbler and a smaller cutter, but the ring survived and rosewater with it. Six Little Cooks belongs to a nineteenth-century genre of instructional fiction in which girls learn housekeeping through a story, and the surrounding scene is doing as much teaching as the recipes: how to time the leavening, why not to flavour everything at one meal with lemon, and the flat requirement that the cook leave the kitchen as she found it before the servant returns from her afternoon out.