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Flour (Currant jelly Cream the butter)
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1/2 teaspoon soda. 1/2 cup sour milk. 1/4 teaspoon salt. Currant jelly Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg well beaten, soda mixed with milk, salt and flour to make a soft dough. Chill and shape, using a round cutter. On the centres of one-half the pieces put currant jelly. Make three small openings in remaining halves, using a thimble, and put pieces RICH COOKIES. - Page 488.
ROYAL FANS. - Page 489.
CHOCOLATE CAKES (Page 491) AND CRESCENTS (Page 534). MERINGUES. - Page 480. together. Press edges slightly, and bake in a rather hot oven, that jumbles may keep in good shape.
This page has come through the scanner badly: the ingredient list has been lost and a run of plate captions ("RICH COOKIES. — Page 488" and the rest) has dropped into the middle of a sentence. The method is intact and workable, but you will be supplying the proportions yourself.
- The missing quantitiesNothing survives but the order of operations — butter creamed, sugar added gradually, beaten egg, soda dissolved in milk, salt, then flour to a soft dough. A standard rolled jumble of this period runs roughly 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1/2 teaspoon soda in 1/4 cup milk, a pinch of salt and about 2 1/2 cups flour, but that is a reconstruction from comparable recipes, not from this text.
- Ignore the interruption"RICH COOKIES. — Page 488 … MERINGUES. — Page 480" is a list of illustration captions from a facing plate, not part of the instructions. Read straight from "put pieces" to "together."
- A rather hot ovenProbably in the region of 400-425F, though the book gives no figure. The recipe's own stated reason for the hot oven is only 'that jumbles may keep in good shape.'
- Soda and milkSoda is what we call baking soda; there is no acid here beyond whatever the milk supplies. With modern sweet milk you will get very little lift, so sour milk or buttermilk may well have been what was meant — it would give both rise and tenderness — but the text says only 'milk.'
- The thimbleThe recipe itself directs a thimble as the small cutter. The wide end of a plain piping tip or the cap of a spice jar does the same job; three holes in the top disc are decorative and let steam escape.
- Chill, and chill again"Chill and shape" matters more than it sounds. A soft dough at room temperature will not take a clean cut, and re-chilling the assembled cookies for fifteen minutes before they go in helps the edges hold.
- The jellyUse a firm, well-set currant jelly and no more than half a teaspoon per cookie. A loose jelly boils, runs out at the seam and welds the cookies to the sheet.
- Yield and baking timeWith the proportions above and a 2 1/2-inch cutter, expect roughly eighteen to twenty finished sandwiches, baking 8 to 10 minutes until the edges are just coloured.
Jumbles are an old cookie name in English, appearing in early receipt books as ring-shaped or knotted sweet biscuits — the name has been linked to the knot or twist of the original shape rather than to any ingredient, though the etymology is unsettled. By Fannie Farmer's time the word had loosened to mean almost any rolled, cut sugar cookie, and the sandwiched version with a window cut in the top lid resembles the Austrian Linzer cookie and the German Spitzbuben, both of which use a similar red fruit preserve seen through a cut-out. Currant jelly was a natural choice: red currants are exceptionally high in pectin, they set reliably without added pectin, and a jar of it served for glazing meat and thinning into sauces as well as for spreading on bread.