Jumbly Goodness

This month's recipe comes from Miss Eliza Leslie's second cookbook Directions for Cookery.  Chocolate just seems to continue to come up in my  life.   So I decided to use it as an ingredient.  Therefore, this month we have:

Cocoa-nut Jumbles
Grate a large cocoa-nut. Rub half a pound of butter into a pound of sifted flour, and wet it with three beaten eggs, and a little rose water. Add by degrees the cocoa-nut, so as to form a stiff dough. Flour your hands and your paste-board, and dividing the dough into equal portions, make the jumbles with your hands into long rolls, and then curl them round and join the ends so as to form rings. Grate loaf -sugar over them; lay them in buttered pans, (not so near as to run into each other,) and bake them in a quick oven from five to ten minutes.

To start with, the word cocoa-nut is an old-fashioned word that refers to the cacao nib, usually grown in South America, of which there are multiple kinds.  This "nut" is in essence the seed of the cacao tree, and the only part that many of us will ever consume.  In order to eat the nib, one must first roast it and then remove the skin, sort of like the skin on a peanut or almond.  The nibs are then ground and pressed in order to remove the oils and fats, what we call cocoa butter.  The resulting powder is what we are familiar with today.

Another way of processing the nibs was discovered in 1828 by a Dutch chemist, Conrad von Hooten.  Hooten's method of processing removed most of the fats and added and alkaline salts to remove the acidic, or sour, taste of the cocoa powder.  This allowed for mass production of cocoa powder.  It is very likely, however, that Miss Leslie was familiar with this kind of cocoa when her book was published. 

Chocolate was not unknown in the United States, very much the opposite in fact.  By this point in time it was a much, or more popular than coffee.  There was also a cocoa grinding mill in Massachusetts that may have supplied Miss Leslie, and other cooks with their cocoa.  For more information check out Louis E. Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro's book Chocolate: History, Culture and Heritage.

As a result of this, I did not start my recipe with cocoa powder, though I will provide a recipe that includes it.  I used roasted cacao nibs that I put through my spice grinder.

I also did not use rosewater, instead I substituted vanilla because I already had it on hand.  I also sprinkled the top of my cookies with turbinado sugar because I like the taste and I wasn't willing to splurge on a loaf of sugar from a living history supplier.   And now I present:

Chocolate Jumbles

3c. flour
1/2c. butter, softened
3 eggs
3tsp. vanilla
1/2c. cocoa powder
granulated sugar

1. Preheat your oven to 350 F.  Spray your baking sheet with cooking spray.

2. Cut butter into flour with a pastry blender or fork until small crumbs form.

3. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl.  Combine eggs, vanilla, cocoa and flour mixture until all of the flour is incorporated.  You may need to use your hands to knead the dry ingredients in.

4.  Separate the dough into two halves.  On a cutting board, or counter, divide the dough evenly.  Roll each cookie about the length of your index finger and curl into a circle.  Space the cookies evenly on the pan.  (They shouldn't spread, so you can place them fairly close together.

5.  Bake in the oven 5-10 minutes, until they are hard and dry to the touch.  Be careful not to burn yourself.

A couple notes:
Warning! The jumbles are to 19th century tastes and have no sugar in the actual recipe.  If you would like to sweeten the recipe you could add ~1c. sugar to the dough.  At this point they are best when supplemented with ice cream, pudding or some such.  I am, however, playing with a recipe which includes sugar.

If you would like recipe with the ratios for cacao nibs let me know, I'd be happy to share those, and sources for purchasing cacao nibs.

My mom enjoying the cookies with some vanilla ice cream.

Errata:  Okay folks, I goofed up.  I let my brain rationalize what I wanted to see when I updated this recipe.  I let myself think that the cocoa-nut Miss Leslie is referring to is the cacao nib.  She really is talking about the fruit, coconut.  I let myself do this because I rationalized that they could be using raw cacao nibs because they would keep longer than processed cocoa.  However, recipes that call for cocoa refer to it as Chocolate or Chocolate Cake.  As I said in the text, there were in fact factories processing cacao nibs into cocoa.  They would have been getting this product at the market.

If you perchance look at the Oxford English Dictionary Online, it catalogs the history of a word and its usage.  It records that various spellings that have been used, anywhere from Coquernut, Cokernut and Cocoa-nut.  The earliest entry for the spelling Cocoa nut is in a 1781 letter written by William Cowper.  I sincerely apologize.  I will still attempt a modification to this recipe to include more sugar, however I also hope to make the proper coconut one as well.