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Finger Biscuits
Take six eggs, and divide the yolks from the whites. Beat up the yolks with half a pound of fine sugar; mix for five minutes, and add the whites, well whipped, with five ounces of flour. Flavour with vanilla, lemon, or orange-flower water. Make a pasteboard funnel, fill it with the paste, and press the biscuits through the aperture at the end, which should be cut to about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. Make the biscuits in the shape of a finger, and about three inches long. Drop them on a baking-sheet in straight lines. Sprinkle finely-sifted sugar over them, and bake in a moderate oven. They should be a light yellow colour. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost of this quantity, 1s.
This is a plain sponge-finger batter — what most cooks now call ladyfingers or savoiardi. It is a genoise-type foam with no chemical leavening, so the air you beat in is the only lift there is.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the whipped whites go into the yolk-and-sugar base, fold with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate the flour. Beaten-down batter spreads into flat wafers instead of holding a plump finger shape.
- Pasteboard funnelA cone rolled from stiff card, the Victorian disposable piping bag. Use a piping bag with a large plain round tip of about 3/4 inch; the diameter given in the recipe is the size of the aperture, not the finished biscuit.
- Weights in modern termsHalf a pound of fine sugar is 8 oz, about 1 1/8 cups granulated; 'fine' here most likely means something close to caster rather than powdered sugar. Five ounces of flour is a scant 1 1/4 cups, best weighed, since this batter is intolerant of an extra spoonful.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. Sponge fingers colour fast at the edges, so the stated ten to fifteen minutes is realistic; pull them at the light yellow colour the recipe asks for, since browning means a dry, brittle biscuit.
- Beating the yolksFive minutes by hand with a whisk; two to three minutes on medium-high in a stand mixer will bring the yolks and sugar to the pale, ribboning stage intended.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent: about half a teaspoon for this quantity. Strength varies between bottles, so taste the batter rather than measuring blind.
- The baking sheetThe recipe says only to drop them on a baking-sheet; period practice was often to butter and flour it, but parchment is better here, as the sugar crust sticks. Pipe in straight lines with a good inch between fingers, since they spread as well as rise.
- The sugar dustingSift it on and let it sit a minute before baking; it draws moisture and bakes to the faintly pearled, crackled top that distinguishes a proper sponge finger from a plain sponge strip.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen fingers three inches long. They dry out quickly, which is part of the point: they were meant to be lined into a mould or soaked.
Sponge fingers of this kind are generally traced to the courts of Savoy, which is why they survive in Italian as savoiardi and in older English cookery as Savoy biscuits or boudoir biscuits. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century they were a workhorse of the English kitchen rather than a treat in themselves: dry, absorbent and cheap, they lined the mould for a charlotte russe, soaked up sherry in a trifle, and were handed round with wine or ices. The costing of a shilling for six eggs' worth of biscuits is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households keeping accounts op own terms — and the whisked-sponge method it teaches goes well beyond the biscuit: master this batter and the same foam becomes a sponge cake, a Swiss roll, or the base of a dozen moulded puddings.