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Honey Jumbles
Chop finely 1/4 pound each of citron and candied orange peel; place in a nappy and just cover with warm strained honey and let stand over night in a warm place. Beat 2 eggs and 1 cupful of white sugar until smooth ; add the fruit and honey, a little salt and 21½ salt and 2½ cupfuls of flour. Knead to a dough, roll thin, cut into fancy shapes and bake in a rather quick oven.
A honey-and-candied-peel cookie built on an overnight maceration, with no chemical leavening at all. The text has an obvious typesetting stumble in the ingredient list that needs sorting out before you start.
- The garbled line"a little salt and 21½ salt and 2½ cupfuls of flour" looks like a compositor's dittography. The likeliest reading is a little salt and 2½ cupfuls of flour, though it is possible a further ingredient or quantity has been lost in the muddle.
- NappyA nappy is a shallow round earthenware bowl with sloping sides, common in period kitchens for soaking and mixing. Any non-reactive bowl does the job.
- The honey quantity is openThe recipe says only to "just cover" the chopped fruit, which for a half pound of finely chopped peel lands somewhere around a third to a half cup of honey. Strained honey means simply warmed and poured through a sieve to remove comb and debris — modern jarred honey is already there.
- Rather quick ovenA quick oven is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 375–400°F. Thin honey cookies colour fast, so check at 7 minutes and expect 8 to 10 in total. Pull them while the centres still look slightly soft; they firm as they cool.
- No leavening, by designNo leavening — There is no saleratus, baking powder or ammonia in this version; the only aeration comes from the beaten eggs and sugar. These bake dense and chewy-crisp rather than puffed.
- Rolling a sticky doughHoney dough resists the rolling pin. Chill it well after kneading, roll between sheets of parchment, and flour the cutters rather than the dough to avoid toughening it.
- CitronCandied citron is the peel of Citrus medica, a thick-rinded fruit that is almost all pith. It is still sold at holiday baking counters; candied lemon peel is the closest substitute in texture, though it is sharper and less floral.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen cookies at 2 inches, depending on your cutters. They keep well in a tin for a week or more — the honey holds moisture.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously baked English sweets, appearing in printed English recipes from the 1590s and in later manuscript receipt books as "jumballs" — stiff, often ring- or knot-shaped biscuits whose name is of uncertain derivation, though it is often linked to the twisted shapes they were formed into. By the time American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries picked them up, jumbles had become simply rolled-and-cut cookies, flavoured with rosewater, caraway, coconut or, as here, honey and candied peel. The overnight steeping of the fruit in warm honey is the real work of the recipe — it softens tough candied peel and perfumes the whole batch in a way that stirring honey in at the end will not.