Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sicilian Biscuits
Sicilian Biscuits
Pound half a stick of vanilla, and work it up thoroughly with six ounces of powdered and sifted sugar and two well-beaten eggs. Put the mixture into a copper saucepan, and stir it briskly over a gentle fire until it is warm. Pour it out, and continue stirring until cold. Add five ounces of flour, and mix all thoroughly together. Fill a forcing-bag with the batter, and press it out in fancy shapes upon a baking-sheet. Cover the surface of the biscuits with finely-powdered sugar, and bake in a gentle oven. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. per pound.
This is a piped sponge biscuit in the savoiardi family — no butter, no raising agent, all the lift coming from eggs warmed and beaten with sugar. The hinge is the warming and cooling: the mixture must be whisked continuously until it is cold and holds a thick ribbon, or the batter will spread on the sheet instead of holding its piped shape.
- Half a stick of vanillaA "stick" is a whole vanilla pod, so half a pod. Pounding it with the sugar in a mortar and then sieving out the woody fibres gives a speckled vanilla sugar; a modern cook can pulse pod and sugar in a spice grinder and sift. About a teaspoon of extract is the lazy equivalent, added off the heat.
- The copper saucepanCopper pans were the standard metal of a well-fitted Victorian kitchen, and copper conducts heat evenly, which would have helped over a coal range. Use any heavy pan, or better, a bowl set over barely simmering water. Do not use raw unlined copper today for a long-held egg mixture.
- "Until it is warm"Aim for roughly 110-120F — warm to a fingertip, not hot. Above about 150F the eggs begin to set and the batter will be grainy. Stir constantly the whole time.
- Whisk until coldThe instruction to "continue stirring until cold" means whisking, and it is where the volume comes from. An electric mixer on medium-high for six to eight minutes will take a warmed egg-and-sugar foam to a pale, thick ribbon at room temperature.
- Folding the flourFive ounces is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of plain flour. Sift it over the foam and fold in thirds with a spatula; "mix all thoroughly" should not be read as beating, which knocks the air out.
- Forcing-bag and shapesA piping bag with a plain half-inch tube. Pipe fingers or rings onto parchment, leaving room to spread, and dust with powdered sugar just before baking — the sugar draws moisture and gives the crisp pearled crust characteristic of these biscuits.
- A gentle ovenRoughly 300-325F, a modern approximation, since the book gives no temperatures. At a quarter of an hour the biscuits should be set, pale gold at the edges and dry to the touch; they crisp further as they cool. Hotter than this and they colour before the centre dries.
- YieldSix ounces of sugar with two eggs makes roughly 24 to 30 finger biscuits. They keep about a week in a tin and are a traditional base for trifle or charlotte.
- The costing"1s. 4d. per pound" is sixteen pence a pound in pre-decimal money, a Victorian retail comparison rather than an instruction.
Piped egg-foam biscuits of this kind run through European baking under a shelf of regional names — savoiardi and biscotti di Savoia in Italy, biscuits à la cuiller in France, sponge fingers, boudoirs and ladyfingers in English — all built on the same trick of whipping whole eggs with sugar over gentle heat so that flour alone can carry the structure. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, collected such variants under national labels with little comment; "Sicilian" here appears to signal a style rather than a documented Sicilian origin, much as "Genoese" and "Savoy" did elsewhere in the book. What the recipe does record is a method using no chemical raising agent at all: the warming step, still standard in génoise, loosens the eggs so they take up more air, and that air is the only lift the biscuit has. The copper pan and the price per pound both suggest the book's audience — a cook working in a reasonably equipped household kitchen who was expected to know what the housekeeping would bear.