History Bakers: Mrs Palmer’s Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam (The Great British Bake Off - Week 2 – Biscuits)

History Bakers: Mrs Palmer’s Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam (The Great British Bake Off - Week 2 – Biscuits)

To tie in with the Great British Bake Off this year staff at the History Centre have decided to gather historic recipes and try them out. With biscuit week just gone here is one of our recipes for biscuits.

Image: U DDHO/19/2 

The recipe dates to the c.1777 and comes from a cook and medicinal book in the hands of the Hotham family of South Dalton. The book contains many recipes we would recognise today, such as Gingerbread but also some that you would go to the doctors for such as a cure for the bite of a mad dog. I chose Sugar Jumbles as I wanted to try something that was not as well known about today.

The Jumble or Iombils first appears in Thomas Dawson’s The Second part of The Good Huswifes Jewell, published in 1597. Though the biscuit is said to date to the Wars of the Roses. The Dawson recipe includes many spices that were new and popular at the time, such as aniseed, caraway and mace.

The version in our recipe book is similar but instead includes the peel of a lemon. The recipe provides very little information, and some baking knowledge is required when making them (as such I left the actual baking to my wife, and I helpfully assisted with the washing up).

The recipe called for:

1lb of flour
1 lb of 6d sugar
4 yolks and 2 egg whites
A piece of butter as big as a large walnut
A spoonful of cream & the peel of a large lemon. Shred fine.

I assumed that 6 pence sugar was a grade of sugar but could not find a specific description of what a modern equivalent would be so regular granulated sugar was used. Clotted cream was used for the ‘cream’ as this was widely available at the time. We did not have a lemon at the time but we had an orange, so we used this as the citrus element instead.

The various ingredients were added together in a mixing bowl which resulted in a rather dry mixture that when compressed together, resembled marzipan, likely due to the amount of sugar in the mixture. Originally Jumbles were made into rings or knots, but we opted for round biscuits for simplicity.

Image: Ingredients before and after mixing

In addition to the Jumbles, we intended to make something called a Fruit Biscuit, which was more akin to a fruit leather than a biscuit. The recipe came from the same book, and involved boiling either, pears, plumbs, apricots or quinces and boiling them before pushing the pulp through a fine sieve.

After peeling and boiling down 3 pears then pressing through a sieve, we added this to 200 grams of caster sugar. The recipe called for double refined sugar which was then sifted. Once again, I could not find a description or exact modern equivalent which is why we decided on caster sugar. The recipe then instructed that the mixture was

beat…as you do eggs for two hours without stopping

Neither of us fancied this task and so we opted to use an electric mixer to speed things up which did not seem to do very much. So, we decided to boil it down further and use it on top of the jumbles instead by carving out a small space on the top. 

Image: Sugar Jumbles with Pear Jam