SC - Jumbles and ciambelle - was: Middle Eastern garb, fudge and ciambelles

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Margo Hablutzel wrote:
> 
> Adamantius, I've made jumbles, and the ciambelle (still unsure of sp) are
> different.  Bear, you may be closer to truth.  However, the receipt at the
> website you offered is VERY different, as it is like a jelly donut.  The
> receipt I have is simply flour, water, yeast, and anise seeds.  Make dough,
> knead, let rise, make rings, boil, dry, bake, snarf.

When I said that ciambelle are jumbles, I was referring to similarites
in method of preparation, and, apparently, etymology. As an extended
example, yes, lasagna is now rarely served boiled in broth and layered
with melted butter and cheese, but there's no denying loseyns is a
recognizable variant. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that the jumble
recipe you used may have been different in many ways from your ciambelle
recipe (I imagine the jumbles were probably full of egg, butter, and
sugar), but the similarities of making a dough, flavoring it with anise
seeds, boiling, drying, and baking are probably too much to chalk up to
coincidence, given the similarities in product name.

>From Karen Hess's notes to recipe 191 in "Martha Washington's Booke of
Cookery", Columbia University Press, 1981:

"Jumbals existed in Italy as ciambelline and in France as gimblettes,
all manifestly related words. The pastry may have originated in Italy,
but I believe Favre is in error when he assigns ciambetta (échaudé,
scalded) as the etymology of gimblette. He also gives what he claims to
be an ancient recipe from Albi  which calls for parboiling the
gimblettes after 'pricking them well', then baking them; also, some old
recipes for éschaudés call for ring shapes. The first citing of 'jumbal'
in OED is from Markham, 1615, but Dawson gives a recipe from 1585, 'To
mak Jombils a hundred,' in which the following instructions are given:
'...and make it in little rowles beeing long, and tye them in
knots...then put them into a pan of seething water,' where they are to
have one walm before being taken out, dried, and baked. Also, in 'The
Accomplished Cook', 1671, Robert May gives recipes for Jemelloes and
Jamballs, where he directs us to 'boil them in fair water like simnels'
before baking them. This makes jumbals originally related in technique
to other ancient cakes such as cracknells and to the breads pretzels and
bagels, for that matter."

My point in mentioning jumbles was that, as you had suggested you didn't
know where to look for a starting-off point in trying to document
ciambelle, which you'd gotten from a secondary or tertiary source, it
might help to know that a similarly named, and to some extent similarly
prepared, cake appears in the Renaissance English corpus.
   
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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