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Lady Fingers
grated rind 1 lemon teaspoon salt powdered sugar Beat yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and continue beating. Add lemon rind and the egg whites, beaten to a stiff froth. Cut and fold in the flour and salt. Shape on buttered sheet, using tablespoon or pastry bag and tube, four inches long and one inch wide. Sprinkle thickly with powdered sugar.
Bake twelve minutes in a moderately hot oven.
The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — the quantities of yolks, whites, sugar and flour have been lost, leaving only the lemon rind, salt and the sugar for dusting. What survives is the method, which is sound and worth following once you have proportions from a current sponge-finger recipe.
- The missing measurementsThere is no honest way to reconstruct the amounts from what is printed. Lady fingers of this period generally ran to roughly equal weights of egg, sugar and flour, but the specific figures Lowney's gave are not recoverable from this page.
- "Moderately hot oven"Usually read today as somewhere around 375-400F, though the book gives no figures. Lady fingers are thin and want a brisk oven that sets the surface before the batter can slump; a slow oven dries them out without any lift.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era the term is ambiguous: some writers distinguish a fine-ground 'powdered' sugar from the finer 'confectioners'' sugar, others use the words interchangeably. Either dissolves readily into the yolks; dusted on top it gives the fine crackled crust associated with a lady finger.
- Cut and foldThis is the hinge. The flour goes in with a cutting-down, scooping-under motion, not a stir — the whites are the only leavening in the recipe, and beating the flour in flattens them.
- Buttered sheetButter alone lets these spread and stick; parchment is the modern equivalent and needs no fat. If you use butter, dust the sheet with flour as well.
- ShapingFour inches by one inch is the standard size, and a plain half-inch tube gives it cleanly. A tablespoon works but produces a rounder, thicker finger that will need a minute or two longer.
- Twelve minutesWatch from ten. They are done when the edges are pale gold and the centre springs back; a fully browned lady finger has gone dry and will not take up cream or syrup properly. Lift them off the sheet while still warm.
- YieldWith the quantities lost there is no yield in the original; for reference, a comparable batch made with four eggs would give roughly two to three dozen fingers, depending on how generously they are piped.
Lady fingers are the English name for the Italian savoiardi, whose origin is traditionally traced to the court of the Duchy of Savoy — hence the older English label "Savoy biscuit" that appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books. They belong to a family of egg-foam sponges that cooks valued precisely because they were structural: dry enough to line a charlotte mould or a trifle dish, porous enough to drink up custard, wine or coffee without collapsing. Their presence in a Lowney's chocolate cookbook looks practical rather than sentimental: a company promoting cocoa and chocolate would plausibly want a stock of plain accompaniments to serve alongside chocolate creams, ice creams and puddings, and a lady finger asks little of the household beyond eggs, sugar and flour.