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Lady's Fingers
One and one-eighth pound of flour, one of powdered sugar, ten eggs; beat eggs and sugar as light as for sponge-cake; sift in with flour one tea-spoon baking powder and stir slowly. Make a funnelshaped bag of heavy ticking or strong brown paper; through the hole in the small end push a funnel-shaped tin tube, one-third inch in diameter at small end and provided with a flange at the other to prevent it from slipping quite through; tie the small end of bag firmly around the tube, and you have a funnel-shaped sack with a firm nozzle projecting slightly from the small end. Into this bag pour the batter, over which gather up the bag tightly so that none will run out, press and run the dough out quickly through the tube into a pan lined with light brown paper (not buttered), making each about a finger long, and about as thick as a lead-pencil, being careful not to get them too wide. Sprinkle with granulated sugar, bake in a quick oven, and, when cool, wet the under side of the paper with a brush, remove and stick the fingers together back to back. The bag, when made of ticking, will be useful in making macaroons and other small cakes. Unsurpassed. -Charles W. Cyphers, Minneapolis, Minn.
A whole-egg sponge batter piped into fingers — the same thing sold today as savoiardi. Most of the original text is instructions for building a pastry bag, which you can skip.
- The bagAny cloth or disposable piping bag with a plain round tip about 1/3 inch (8 mm) across does exactly what the ticking-and-tin contraption did. Fill no more than two-thirds full and pipe in one continuous squeeze so the fingers do not show joins.
- Weigh, do not measureOne and one-eighth pound of flour is 18 oz, roughly 4 cups scooped and levelled; one pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Both are given by weight in the original because that is the only reliable way to hold this ratio — use a scale.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn 1877 the term meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no cornstarch in it. Caster or superfine sugar is the correct substitute; modern confectioners' sugar will not whip into the eggs the same way.
- Egg sizeNineteenth-century eggs were generally smaller than a modern large egg, so ten of them may come nearer nine large modern eggs by weight.
- The hinge: the foam"Beat eggs and sugar as light as for sponge-cake" means whipping whole eggs and sugar until pale, tripled, and thick enough to ribbon off the beater — five to eight minutes in a stand mixer. Everything depends on that air, so the flour goes in by hand in two or three additions, folded rather than stirred.
- OvenA quick oven is usually reckoned around 400-425F, which browns fingers this thin very fast. Watch them from six minutes; they are done at pale gold and dry to the touch, eight to ten minutes at most, and past that they darken and turn brittle.
- PaperParchment replaces the "light brown paper," and it needs no butter and no wetting — the fingers lift off cleanly once cool. Wetting the underside of the paper was the original way of freeing them from that lining.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a very large batch, well over five dozen fingers, halved in number once sandwiched back to back. They keep a week in a tin and stale usefully: day-old ladyfingers are what you want for lining a charlotte or trifle.
Ladyfingers are the English name for the French biscuit à la cuillère, "spoon biscuit" — the name is traditionally traced to the practice, before piping bags became common kitchen equipment, of shaping the batter with two spoons, which gave a plumper, rougher finger. The contributor of the 1877 recipe spends more words on constructing the bag than on the cake, and he notes it will serve for macaroons too. The sponge is lifted partly by a teaspoon of baking powder, a commercial product by then several decades old. Buckeye Cookery names its contributors with their towns, which is why this one carries a name and a city, and the flat verdict "Unsurpassed" is the contributor's own.