Home › The Principles of Cookery › Savoy Biscuits, or Ladies' Fingers
Savoy Biscuits, or Ladies' Fingers
These biscuits are used for making a number of fancy dishes. They contain a good deal of nourishment, and are excellent for the young and weakly when soaked in beef-tea or milk. To make them, break six eggs, and separate the whites from the yolks. Beat the yolks well, and whilst beating strew in six ounces of powdered and sifted sugar which has been rubbed upon the rind of a lemon before being broken. Beat the mixture till smooth, and add gradually three-quarters of a pound of dry flour and the whites of the eggs beaten to a solid froth. Bake the biscuits in fluted tins sold for the purpose, lined with buttered paper; or, if these are not at hand, draw the paste in straight lines upon thick paper, or make little cases with buttered writing-paper. The biscuits should be made in the shape of a finger, three-quarters of an inch wide, and about four inches long. Bake in a quick oven. When putting the biscuits away, lay them in couples back to back. If preferred, a tea-spoonful of orange-flower or rose-water may be used instead of lemon-juice to flavour the biscuits. Time to bake, eight minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. per pound. Or whisk twelve eggs thoroughly with three table-spoonfuls of water, and add very gradually one pound of powdered and sifted sugar. Beat the mixture till it is as smooth and thick as cream, then stir into it one pound of dried and sifted flour. Mould it into long cakes, and bake in a slow oven.
A Victorian sponge-finger formula that predates the piping bag as standard equipment, which explains the business with buttered writing-paper. The method itself is a separated-egg sponge and behaves exactly as one today.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the whipped whites go in, everything depends on keeping the air in them. Fold the flour and whites alternately in thirds with a large spatula, stopping the moment no dry streaks remain; overworked batter spreads flat and bakes to a rubbery strip rather than a light finger.
- Oven temperaturesA "quick oven" of this period is usually taken as roughly 425-450F (220-230C), and eight minutes at that heat suits fingers this size — they should be pale gold and dry to the touch, not browned. The second, twelve-egg version calls for a "slow oven," conventionally reckoned around 300F (150C); the recipe gives no time for it, and it will need considerably longer, giving a drier, crisper biscuit better suited to keeping.
- The flour looks high — and isThree-quarters of a pound of flour (12 oz, about 340 g) to six eggs and 6 oz sugar is a much stiffer batter than modern savoiardi, which tend to run closer to equal weights of flour and sugar. The density may well be why these hold their shape without a piping tin and survive soaking in beef-tea, though the recipe does not say so. If you want the airy commercial ladyfinger, reduce the flour toward 6-7 oz.
- Sugar on the lemon rindRubbing sugar against the lemon peel to strip the oil is a genuine technique, not a quaint flourish; the recipe has the sugar rubbed on the rind in lump form "before being broken" to powder. Rubbing granulated sugar into the finely grated zest of one lemon with your fingertips gives much the same result before powdering it.
- A slip in the originalThe flavouring is lemon rind, but the note about orange-flower or rose-water offers them "instead of lemon-juice." No juice appears anywhere in the recipe. Read it as an alternative flavouring: a teaspoon of orange-flower or rose water in place of the lemon zest.
- Papers and tins"Fluted tins sold for the purpose" are ladyfinger pans, still made. Buttered writing-paper means baking parchment now — no buttering needed. A piping bag with a half-inch plain tube is faster than drawing lines: pipe strips 3/4 in wide and 4 in long, spaced two inches apart, and dust with icing sugar before baking for the traditional pearled crust.
- Storing back to backThe recipe directs pairing them flat sides together; the usual explanation is that it protects the soft undersides, though no reason is given here. Once fully cooled, an airtight tin does the job; they keep about a week and are no worse for trifle as they stale.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the six-egg quantity will make several dozen fingers and the twelve-egg version roughly twice that. Both are more than most households want at once, and a foam batter of this kind should be baked as soon as it is mixed.
Savoy biscuits take their name from the House of Savoy, and are traditionally said to have been created at that court for a visiting French king, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented; the Italian name savoiardi preserves the same association. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s the biscuit had two quite separate lives in an English kitchen. It was the structural element of the grand cold puddings — charlotte russe was built inside a wall of them, and trifle depended on their capacity to soak without collapsing — and it was also a staple of the sickroom, which is why this entry opens not with charlottes but with the young and the weakly, and beef-tea. That pairing tells you something about Victorian invalid cookery: beef-tea was regarded as concentrated nourishment, and a dry, sweet, egg-rich biscuit was the acceptable vehicle for getting it into someone with no appetite. The quoted price is 1s 8d per pound, and the recipe calls for six eggs.