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Savoy Biscuits, Cold
Take a little more than half a pound of very fine dry flour, one pound of very dry pounded sugar, and fourteen or fifteen eggs, very fresh; if the eggs are large, fourteen are sufficient. Rasp over the sugar the peel of two lemons or oranges and let it dry; then have two vessels, one for the whites and one for the yolks; break the eggs one by one, and be particular in smelling them, as one bad one will spoil all; put the dry sugar with the yolks, and work them together with two new wooden spoons; next whip the whites very firm, and, to prevent them turning, put with them a small pinch of calcined alum; when the whites are very firm, take half to mix with the yolks; then put all together, put the flour into a hair sieve, and sift it over the eggs; mix gently with the whites, then butter a mould, and powder it over with fine sugar; put the biscuit into the mould a little at a time. Put some ashes on a baking-dish, and put the mould over this in the oven; the heat must be moderate. About one hour is requisite to bake this biscuit, and it must not be moved till it is quite done.
This is biscuit de Savoie — a fatless whipped-egg sponge baked in a tall fluted mould. Everything depends on the whites, and on not disturbing the cake while it sets.
- The hinge: don't open, don't moveA sponge with no fat and no chemical leavening holds its rise only on beaten egg and steam. Opening the oven early, or shifting the mould, collapses it past recovery. Leave it the full hour.
- Weights and proportions"A little more than half a pound" of flour is roughly 9 oz (250 g) against 1 lb (450 g) sugar. Note the recipe's own qualification: fifteen eggs if they are on the small side, fourteen if they are large. Period eggs tended to be smaller than modern ones, so a cook using large modern eggs will likely need somewhat fewer than fourteen.
- Calcined alumBurnt alum was added to steady whites against weeping. Omit it. A pinch of cream of tartar or a few drops of lemon juice does the same job with no astringency and no metallic edge.
- Rasping the sugarGrating the lemon or orange zest directly into the sugar and letting it dry is an oleo-saccharum: the sugar crystals draw out the citrus oil. It gives far more perfume than zest stirred in at the end, and is worth doing an hour ahead.
- New wooden spoonsThe point was most likely grease rather than novelty: wood absorbs fat, and any trace of fat in bowl or spoon will slacken whipped whites. Use scrupulously clean equipment; a copper or stainless bowl for the whites, never plastic.
- The ashes and the ovenA bed of ashes on a baking dish would have insulated the mould from fierce bottom heat. Set the mould on a heavy baking sheet, or a sheet doubled, on the middle shelf. "Moderate" is usually taken to mean somewhere around 325-350F (165-175C); the lower end suits a deep mould.
- The mouldA tall fluted savoy or kugelhopf-type mould; the recipe gives no size. Butter it and dust with caster sugar rather than flour, as directed - the sugar gives a crisp, faintly caramelised crust. Fill it a spoonful at a time, as the recipe says, to avoid trapping large air pockets.
- Smelling the eggsBreaking each egg into a separate cup before it joins the others is still the right practice, less for spoilage than because one broken yolk in the whites means they will not whip.
- YieldA cake of this size will serve ten or so. A fatless sponge of this type is dry by design, and can be served plain or with fruit, cream or a custard sauce.
The biscuit de Savoie is the forerunner of the fatless whipped-egg sponges, and its name is traditionally traced to the court of the Counts of Savoy in the fourteenth century, though the attribution is legend rather than documented record. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was widely regarded as a test of a pastry cook's hand: with no butter, no baking powder and nothing but whipped egg to lift a pound of sugar and rather more than half as much flour, success or failure was visible at a glance. The "cold" in the title appears to distinguish it from warm-method sponges, where yolks and sugar are whisked over hot water; here the yolks are worked cold with dry sugar, and the lightness comes from separately beaten whites folded in two stages.