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German Lady Fingers
5 eggs (yolks) ½ pound sugar ½ pound blanched almonds Grated rind of 1 lemon ½ pound Five Roses flour.
Beat the yolks and sugar for 15 minutes. Add almonds cut fine and grated lemon rind. Mix well, and add the flour gradually. Roll out and cut into strips length and size of your forefinger. Bake in moderate oven.
This is a stiff almond dough that is rolled and cut, not the piped sponge batter sold as ladyfingers today. Weights, not cups, are the reliable guide here.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of granulated sugar is about 1⅛ cups; half a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; half a pound of blanched almonds is roughly 1½ cups whole. Weighing gives a more predictable dough, since the flour and the yolks are all that hold it together.
- Moderate ovenRead that as about 350 to 375F. Strips this small bake in roughly 10 to 14 minutes, and they are done when the edges are pale gold and the tops feel set rather than tacky.
- Chop, do not grind"Almonds cut fine" means knife-cut or coarsely chopped. Running them through a food processor to a paste releases oil, and the dough turns greasy and spreads in the oven.
- The 15-minute beatingThat timing assumes a hand whisk or a rotary beater. With a stand mixer on medium-high, five to six minutes gets the yolks and sugar pale, thick and ribboning off the whisk, which is the whole leavening this recipe has.
- Handling the doughWith five yolks and no butter or liquid, the mixture is dense and sticky rather than a tidy pastry. Chill it 30 to 60 minutes before rolling, work on a lightly floured board, and roll about ⅜ inch thick so the strips keep the finger shape.
- YieldExpect three to four dozen fingers about three inches long. They firm as they cool and keep well in a tin for a week or more; they are meant to be crisp, not cakey.
- Not ladyfingers for trifleThese are too firm and too rich in almond to stand in for savoiardi in tiramisu or a charlotte. They are a tea and coffee biscuit.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and like most milling-company books it appears to have been largely assembled from recipes sent in by customers -- which is why a page of "small cakes" can range so widely in origin. Almond sticks of this kind (Mandelstangen) are often compared to a long-standing form in German and Austrian baking, where a stiff yolk-and-almond dough is rolled, cut into batons and baked crisp, and the English name "lady fingers" was attached loosely in North America to almost any small finger-shaped sweet biscuit rather than only to the piped Italian savoiardi. The reliance on egg yolks and ground nuts for richness, with no butter and no chemical leavening, marks it as an older European style of biscuit -- a reminder of how much Canadian home baking arrived with immigrant households and was then written down in a flour miller's pamphlet.