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Maria Fraser's Honey-Jumbles
2 cups honey, 1 cup butter, 4 eggs (mix well), 1 cup buttermilk (mix), 1 good quart ), 1 cup buttermilk (mix), 1 good quart of flour, 1 level teaspoonful soda or salerais too thin, stir in a little more flour. If too thin it will fall. It does not want to be as thin as sugar-cake. Use very thick honey.
Be sure to use the same cup for measure. Be sure to mix the honey, eggs and butter well together.
A soft honey drop cookie from the era when flour was measured by volume in whatever cup happened to be on the shelf. The dough is meant to be stiff enough to hold a mound, and the instructions are more concerned with consistency than with time or temperature.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the nineteenth-century term for a chemical leavener, originally potassium bicarbonate and later sodium bicarbonate (baking soda); for this recipe it can be treated as baking soda. It is paired with buttermilk, whose acidity is what activates it.
- A quart of flourDry goods were measured by volume; a quart is 4 cups, roughly 17-18 oz of all-purpose flour. The instruction to use the same cup throughout matters because the honey, butter and flour are all being proportioned against each other rather than weighed.
- Leavening is light for the volumeOne level teaspoon of soda against a quart of flour and two cups of honey is on the low side by modern standards, and the original text is not fully clear on the amount. Expect a dense, cakey cookie rather than a puffed one.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Honey browns quickly, so a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern starting point; much hotter and the edges may darken before the centres set.
- TimingNo time is given. Dropped cookies of a usual size will take somewhere in the region of 10-14 minutes. They should look set at the edge and still soft in the middle -- honey doughs firm considerably as they cool, and a cookie baked until firm in the oven will be hard on the plate.
- "Too thin it will fall"This is the hinge. The batter should mound on the spoon and hold its shape on the sheet; if it slumps and spreads, work in more flour a spoonful at a time before baking the rest.
- Very thick honeyA thick, set honey brings less liquid into the dough than a thin runny one, which fits the recipe's concern with the batter being too thin. If your honey is runny, expect to need the extra flour the recipe anticipates.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a large batch, several dozen cookies depending on the size dropped. It halves without difficulty.
Jumbles are among the oldest continuously baked English-American cookies, appearing in printed receipt books from the sixteenth century onward, originally as a stiff ring or knot of dough. The name is often linked to gemel, a doubled or twinned ring, from the shape the dough was tied into, though the origin is not settled. By the time this book was compiled the ring had largely been abandoned and a jumble simply meant a plain sweet cookie, dropped or rolled.