No. 3348

Jumbles

Work to a cream one pound of butter with one pound of sugar, add a little grated nutmeg and five eggs, one at a time, then a pound and a quarter of flour. Place this preparation in a pocket furnished with a channeled socket five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and dress on a buttered sheet in the shape of one and a half inch rounds, keeping them an inch and a quarter apart, then bake in a hot oven. As soon as done remove them from the oven and when cool detach at once from the sheet.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A plain creamed-butter cookie piped rather than rolled, in the huge batch sizes a restaurant kitchen worked in. The proportions are sound; only the equipment vocabulary and the oven need translating.

Scale the batch downA pound of butter, a pound of sugar, five eggs and a pound and a quarter of flour yields roughly six to seven dozen inch-and-a-half cookies. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment.
Weights to volumeOne pound butter is four sticks (2 cups), one pound granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, and a pound and a quarter of flour is about 4 1/2 cups. Weighing is better here, since the flour is the only thing holding a very soft batter together.
"A pocket furnished with a channeled socket"A pastry bag fitted with a fluted star tip. Five-sixteenths of an inch is about 8 mm, roughly a standard medium open-star tip.
Hot ovenRead this as 400-425F. At that heat, piped rounds of this size take about 8 to 10 minutes and should be pulled when the edges have just colored and the centers still look pale.
Piping and spacingAn inch and a quarter apart is generous for a cookie that spreads only moderately; keep it, since a batter this rich in butter will slump. Pipe in a flat spiral rather than a mound so they bake evenly.
The contradictory last line"when cool detach at once" reads oddly; one way to take it is as shorthand for letting them set briefly rather than chilling on the sheet. In practice, loosen them while still warm or the sugar-heavy bottoms weld to the pan; a parchment-lined sheet removes the problem entirely.
NutmegGrate it fresh. In a cookie with no other flavoring, pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a jar contributes almost nothing. About a quarter teaspoon per pound of butter is in keeping with "a little."
Buttered sheetParchment or a silicone mat is the easier substitution.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its tea-cake chapter is essentially a catalogue of small piped and cut sweets a large kitchen could turn out by the tray. Jumbles are far older than the book: they appear in English recipe collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as "jumbals," stiff sugar-and-egg pastes flavored with rose water, aniseed or caraway and worked into knots and rings, and the name is generally traced to a ring or twin-loop shape rather than to any ingredient. By Ranhofer's day the dough had lightened into a creamed butter batter soft enough to pipe, and the knot had given way to a plain round, but the name stuck. American cookbooks of the nineteenth century carried jumbles constantly.