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Ladies' Fingers
1 egg (or 2 eggs) 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter ¼ cup sweet milk 1 pint Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Beat the butter, sugar and egg together until very light. Add the vanilla and milk. Last, add the baking powder and flour sifted together. Cut in little strips about ¼ inch thick, roll in sugar and bake in quick oven. Use your hands to roll, instead of rolling pin.
A stiff, hand-rolled cookie dough rather than the piped sponge batter the name usually suggests. The original gives no baking time and no yield, so both need filling in.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, a pint is 2 cups. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour; ordinary all-purpose is the closest match, and the dough should come together stiff enough to roll under the palms without sticking. Add flour a spoonful at a time at the end if it slackens.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes often called for with soda. Whole milk is the intended thing.
- One egg or twoThe choice is real, not a printing slip. One egg gives a drier, crisper stick; two give a softer, more cakelike finger and a slightly wetter dough that may want an extra spoonful or two of flour.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Strips a quarter inch thick set and colour fast at that heat, so watch from six minutes on; eight to ten minutes is usually enough. Pull them when the edges are pale gold and the tops still look dry rather than browned.
- Rolling by handThe recipe explicitly says to use your hands instead of a rolling pin. Pinch off walnut-sized pieces and roll them into ropes on a sugared board; the dough is soft enough that hand-rolling shapes it more easily than a pin.
- Rolling in sugarGranulated sugar, rolled on before baking, gives the crackled crust. The recipe has you roll the cut strips in sugar; a sugared board as you shape also works.
- YieldThe original gives none; expect roughly three to four dozen fingers if rolled to about three inches, depending on thickness. They keep a week in a tin and crisp up again in a low oven.
The name covers two quite different things. In European baking, biscuits à la cuiller or savoiardi are a piped egg-foam sponge, the ladyfinger that lines a charlotte or a trifle; in North American home cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "ladies' fingers" often meant simply a slender sugar-rolled cookie, named for the shape and nothing else. This is the second kind, and it belongs to the section of small cakes a household could turn out quickly from creamed butter, sugar and a chemical leavener. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and the recipes were gathered from Canadian housewives, which accounts for the tone of the last line: a cook writing from her own kitchen telling another cook that hands work better than a pin.