Jumbles

The word derives from the Italian gemello, or “twin.” When jumbles first came to England from Italy, in the sixteenth century, they were sugary, anise-flavored cookies formed by tying ropes of dough in elaborate two-sided knots, such as a figure-eight or a pretzel knot. (See also Springerle.) Over the course of the seventeenth century, jumbles evolved into butter cookies typically formed as rings, in which guise they persisted in English and American baking into the mid-twentieth century. In early modern England, the word also designated fruit pastes and sugar pastes worked up in jumbles-like forms.