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Sour Milk Jumbles
Two cups of sugar; one cup of butter; one cup of sour milk or cream; three eggs; one-half of a nutmeg grated; one teaspoon of soda; and flour enough to roll; about six cups full.
KORNETTES-Beat the white of one egg until very stiff, and, continuing the beating, mix in one-third of a cup of light brown sugar. Melt a heaping teaspoon of butter and into this stir threefourths of a cup of chopped popcorn, adding one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt and one-half teaspoon of vanilla. Beat the two mixtures together and drop by the spoonful on to a buttered bakingsheet.
Two recipes have run together on this page: the jumbles themselves, and a meringue-and-popcorn drop called Kornettes. Neither gives an oven temperature or a baking time, which was normal in 1911 and is the main gap to fill.
- Sour milkThis means milk soured naturally, which today's pasteurised milk will not reliably do. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir one tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is there to react with the soda, so plain sweet milk leaves the soda unneutralised and the cookies flat.
- SodaOne teaspoon of baking soda, not baking powder. There is no other leavening, so the dough should go into the oven reasonably soon after mixing rather than resting on the counter.
- Flour enough to rollSix cups is a starting figure, not a rule. Add it until the dough just holds together and rolls at about a quarter inch without sticking badly; a chill of half an hour makes it far easier to handle. Overshooting the flour is the usual way these turn tough.
- OvenBake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and just colouring. Jumbles are meant to be pale and short, not browned through.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated is roughly a rounded teaspoon, and it is the entire flavouring of the cookie. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity tastes dusty.
- ShapeA jumble is traditionally cut as a ring, or rolled into a rope and the ends joined. Plain rounds work identically if you would rather not bother.
- YieldWith two cups of sugar and six of flour this is a large batch: roughly five to six dozen cookies of two and a half inches. Halving it is straightforward apart from the three eggs.
- The KornettesChopped popcorn means popped corn, chopped after popping. The original says to beat the two mixtures together; folding them lightly instead keeps the whites from collapsing. Drop them on the buttered sheet the recipe calls for, or on parchment, and bake around 300F for about 20 minutes until dry and just set; they are essentially a meringue, so they want a slow oven and complete cooling before you lift them.
Jumbles are among the oldest continuously printed English cookies, appearing in seventeenth-century receipt books as "jumbals", sugar rings sometimes flavoured with rose water or caraway; the name is often linked to the ring or knot shape rather than to any jumbling of ingredients, though the derivation is not settled. By the time this book was issued in 1911, the jumble had become an everyday sour-milk cookie of the American farm kitchen: sour milk and soda were a common leavening for households that kept a cow and had milk turning daily. The Kornettes tacked on beneath are a different creature entirely - a novelty confection of the decades around the turn of the century, when popped corn was cheap, plentiful, and worked into everything from balls to fritters.