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Confederate Jumbles
One and a half cups white sugar, three-fourths cup butter, three eggs, three table-spoons sweet milk, half tea-spoon soda and one of cream tartar; mix with sufficient flour to roll; roll and sprinkle with sugar; cut out and bake. - Mrs. Mollie Pilcher, Jackson.
A plain rolled sugar cookie, given with no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no time — all three of which you supply yourself. The dough is soft and benefits from chilling before it meets the rolling pin.
- "Sufficient flour to roll"Expect about 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of sugar, butter and egg. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and stops sticking to your hand; extra flour past that point gives a dry, hard jumble.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft. Refrigerate it at least an hour, then roll a portion at a time about 1/4 inch thick, keeping the rest cold.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Soda and cream tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with one of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to about 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. If you substitute, drop both the soda and the cream of tartar rather than keeping one.
- Sugar on topSprinkle the sugar over the rolled sheet and press it in lightly with the pin before cutting, so it adheres during baking. Coarse or granulated sugar holds its texture; confectioners' sugar disappears.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colored and the centers still look pale. These are thin cookies and go from done to over-browned quickly.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies. They keep a week in a tin and are firmer, and better, on the second day.
Jumbles are one of the oldest continuously made English-language cookies, appearing in print as "jumballs" by the sixteenth century, when they were often flavored with rose water or caraway and tied into knots and rings — a shape that is generally credited with giving the name, though the etymology is disputed and "jumble" may simply be the older "gemel," a twin or double ring. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, a jumble could mean any plain rolled sugar cookie cut with a tin, though ring-shaped jumbles cut with a jumble cutter persisted through the nineteenth century. The "Confederate" in the title is a period label rather than a wartime formula: this version is generous with butter, eggs and white sugar, none of which was easily had in the blockaded South, and it belongs to the postwar decades when Southern community cookbooks attached Confederate names to a good many ordinary recipes. The signature — Mrs. Mollie Pilcher of Jackson — reflects the book's practice of printing contributions from named housekeepers across the region largely as received, ambiguous flour measures and all, alongside material drawn from an existing published text.