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Savoy Biscuits
Take twelve parts of sugar, seven parts of flour, and twelve parts of eggs, and add ground lemon-rind by way of flavouring. Bake in the usual way, and after the biscuits have been a few minutes in the oven grate a little sugar over the top of them.
This is a whisked sponge batter given as a ratio rather than a recipe — the same mixture piped into fingers is sold today as sponge fingers or ladyfingers. Everything depends on how much air you beat into the eggs, since there is no leavening.
- The parts are by weightTwelve parts sugar, seven flour, twelve eggs means weighed, not measured by volume. A workable batch: 300 g (about 6) eggs, 300 g caster sugar, 175 g plain flour.
- Separate the eggsCassell's terse "bake in the usual way" assumes the standard Savoy method of the period: yolks beaten with the sugar until pale and ribboning, whites whipped to a firm snow, the two folded together with the sifted flour added last and lightly. Overmixing at the flour stage collapses the foam and gives a tough, flat biscuit.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction beyond "bake in the usual way." As modern guidance: 350F (175C) for 8 to 12 minutes for piped fingers, until pale gold and just firm. If you want them dry enough to keep, drop to 300F (150C) and give them longer.
- "Grate a little sugar"Sugar was still commonly sold as a hard loaf to be scraped or grated, which explains the wording. Sift over caster or icing sugar instead. Doing it a few minutes into the bake, as directed, lets the surface set first so the sugar sits on top as a crust rather than dissolving into the batter.
- Piping and pansPipe fingers about 4 inches long onto baking parchment, well spaced; the batter spreads. The traditional grooved Savoy tin is unnecessary. The same mixture baked in a lined tin gives a sponge base.
- Lemon rind"Ground" lemon-rind means finely grated zest — the outer yellow only, since the white pith is bitter. Zest from one large lemon suits the quantities above; rub it into the sugar first to draw out the oils.
- Yield and keepingAbout 30 to 36 fingers. They stale quickly but dry well: left in a cooling oven they crisp into the biscuit used to line charlottes and trifles, and for tiramisu.
Savoy biscuits — biscuits de Savoie, close kin to the French biscuits à la cuiller spooned out before piping bags were common — take their name from the House of Savoy, and are traditionally said to have been made for a visiting emperor at the Savoyard court in the fourteenth century, a story repeated far more often than it is documented. What is certain is that by the nineteenth century the whisked egg-sugar-flour sponge was a fixed item of the English confectioner's repertoire, the thing you lined a charlotte russe with or handed round with wine.