Beat the yolks of 6 eggs with 10 ounces of powdered sugar; add 1 ounce of powdered French chocolate. Mix well with 4 ounces of flour and the whites beaten stiff with a pinch of salt; add 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract. Bake on wafer sheets in small cakes to a light brown.
May 21 — No. 21
French
This is a piped sponge drop in the biscuit à la cuiller family — a meringue-lightened batter with no chemical leavening and no fat beyond the yolks. The whites are the only thing holding it up, so how you fold decides whether you get a light cake or a chocolate wafer.
- Weights, not cups6 yolks, 10 oz sugar, 4 oz flour and 1 oz chocolate — use a scale. Four ounces of flour is a scant cup; the cup equivalent for the sugar depends on how finely it is ground, so weigh it rather than measuring by volume. Guessing at either will ruin the ratio.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match and dissolves into the yolks properly.
- "Powdered French chocolate"Most likely sweetened eating chocolate grated to a powder, of the kind sold in cakes for drinking chocolate, rather than cocoa. Finely grated dark chocolate is the nearest thing; unsweetened cocoa powder would make the batter drier and more bitter at the same weight.
- Fold, do not mix"Mix well" is the one instruction to disobey. Beat the yolks and sugar to a pale ribbon, then fold the sifted flour and grated chocolate in alternately with the stiff whites in three additions, stopping the moment no streaks remain.
- Wafer sheetsEdible wafer paper laid on the baking tin, which is eaten with the cake or peels away, and keeps the sticky batter from welding to the metal. Parchment does the same job.
- Shaping and sizePipe or spoon walnut-sized mounds about 1 1/2 inches across, well spaced. The batter spreads.
- Oven and timeThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for 10 to 12 minutes — "a light brown" at the edges with the centres just set. These overbake quickly and turn hard as they cool.
- VanillaA full tablespoon is a lot of liquid for this batter by modern taste; 1 to 2 teaspoons of extract is enough and keeps the whites from slackening.
- YieldAbout 30 to 36 small cakes. Best the day they are baked; they soften noticeably by the second day.
Sponge drops of this kind — yolks and sugar beaten to a ribbon, whites folded in, a small measure of flour, no butter — belong to the French biscuit tradition that also produced the ladyfinger. What suggests the period is the "powdered French chocolate": chocolate often reached kitchens as a hard sweetened cake to be grated rather than as a cocoa powder, and "French" on a chocolate label may have signalled quality as much as place of origin. The recipe's appearance in a book that gives one dish per day, each tagged to a country, reflects a fashion for cosmopolitan menus, in which a plain chocolate sponge drop could stand in for all of France on the twenty-first of May.