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POTATO BISCUITS (M. Ude's recipe)
Take fifteen fresh eggs, break the yolks into one pan and the whites into another. Beat the yolks with a pound of sugar pounded very fine, scrape the peel of a lemon with a lump of sugar, dry that, and pound it fine also; then throw it into the yolks, and work the eggs and sugar till they are of a whitish colour. Next, whip the whites well, and mix them with the yolks. Now sift half a pound of flour of potatoes through a silk sieve over the eggs and sugar. Have some paper cases ready, which lay on a plafond, with some paper underneath. Fill the cases, but not too full; glaze the contents with some rather coarse sugar, and bake the whole in an oven moderately heated.
A pure egg-foam sponge with no butter and no leavening beyond the eggs themselves, baked in paper cases as small individual cakes. The whole thing stands or falls on the aeration, so read the folding note first.
- Fold, do not stirThe yolk-sugar base must be beaten until pale and thick enough to ribbon, and the whites folded in with a light hand before the starch goes over the top. There is no chemical leavening here; any air knocked out is lost for good and the cakes bake dense and rubbery.
- "Flour of potatoes" means potato starchUde wants potato farina — the fine white starch sold today as potato starch, or fécule. Modern "potato flour" is ground dried whole potato, which is heavier, absorbent and grey-beige; it will not give the same dry, tender crumb.
- The sugar-lump zest trickRubbing a lump of sugar over the lemon until it is saturated with oil, then drying and crushing it, extracts the peel oil without the bitter pith or wet shreds. A microplaned zest rubbed into a spoonful of the sugar does the same job.
- Silk sieveSimply the finest sieve available in 1800s kitchens. Sift the starch two or three times through a fine-mesh strainer; it lumps badly and any lump will show as a pale streak in the finished cake.
- Plafond and paper casesA plafond is a flat, low-sided baking sheet. The paper cases are moulded rectangles or rounds of stiff paper — muffin liners or small paper baking moulds set on a lined tray answer the purpose. The recipe says only to fill them "not too full"; about two-thirds is a safe reading, because the batter climbs.
- Coarse sugar glazeThe "rather coarse sugar" is nib or pearl sugar, which holds its shape and crusts rather than dissolving. Sanding sugar is the nearest common substitute; ordinary granulated will simply melt in.
- Oven temperature"Moderately heated" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 325–350F. Small cases will take roughly 15–20 minutes and are done when the tops spring back and a skewer comes out clean; a hotter oven browns the sugar crust before the centre sets.
- QuantityFifteen eggs, a pound of sugar and half a pound of starch is a professional-scale batch. Dividing by three (five eggs, about 5 oz sugar, a scant 3 oz potato starch) gives a domestic quantity in the same proportions.
Louis Eustache Ude was among the best-known chefs working in England in the early nineteenth century — cook to the Earl of Sefton, later at Crockford's Club for something like a decade from the late 1820s, and author of The French Cook (1813), which ran through many editions and was still being quarried by compilers decades later, which is how his name comes to be attached to a recipe in Cassell's. What he describes is essentially a biscuit de Savoie made with potato farina instead of wheat flour, a fashionable refinement of the period: potato starch was prized for producing a drier, shorter, more delicate crumb than wheat, and appears throughout Regency and Victorian confectionery for exactly that reason. Baking such batters in paper cases set on a flat plafond was standard practice before individual tins were common, the paper serving as both mould and wrapper for cakes meant to be handed round at dessert.