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Assorted Italian Cakes-Six Ways
1. Sponge drops: Proceed as for lady-fingers and drop the batter on paper in round shape, large or small; according to fancy. 2. Place flat sponge drops by twos together with jelly spread between, or lemon or orange paste. 3. Have ready a lot of sponge drops. Make two or more colors and flavors of boiled icing or glaze, (directions for making which have already been given,) and dip the bottom of each cake, holding it on a fork, then set the cakes on baking pans to dry. 4. Instead of dipping the bottoms let the tops of the sponge drops receive the icing, and when dry place them by twos together of different colors of glaze with yellow orange paste or conserve between them. 5. Have some finely minced almonds, pistachios, hickory nuts, or desiccated cocoanut ready and mix with the batter after the manner of macaroons and dredge granulated sugar over the cakes instead of powdered before baking. 6. Instead of mixing the minced almonds in the batter mingle powdered sugar with it and dredge it over the moist tops of the cakes before baking.
Six variations on a single base: the lady-finger batter, piped or dropped in rounds instead of fingers. Nothing here works unless the drops themselves are right, so start there.
- The hinge is the batterLady-finger batter is a separated-egg sponge — yolks beaten with sugar, whites whipped stiff, flour folded in last with as few strokes as possible. Overmixing after the flour goes in deflates the whites and the drops spread and flatten rather than doming.
- "Drop the batter on paper"Dropped from a spoon or piped from a bag with a plain tip; the original would have used stiff paper laid on the pan. Keep the rounds a consistent size, since two of the six variations (2 and 4) depend on pairing the cakes.
- "Paste" and "conserve"Lemon or orange paste here is a thick, spreadable sweetened citrus filling, closer to a stiff curd or reduced marmalade than to almond paste. A conserve is a whole-fruit preserve with pieces in it. Either must be thick enough not to weep into the sponge.
- Boiled icing and glazeBoiled icings of this period are generally sugar syrups taken to about the soft-ball stage and then worked until opaque; use them warm and fluid, and re-warm gently over water as they stiffen. Dipping the flat bottom, as in variation 3, gives a neater edge than dipping the domed top.
- Nuts and coconutHickory nuts are a native American nut with a flavour between pecan and walnut; pecans substitute directly. "Desiccated cocoanut" is unsweetened dried coconut, not the sweetened flake sold today — sweetened flake will make the drops cloying and burn at the edges.
- Granulated versus powdered sugarThe distinction between variations 5 and 6 is deliberate. Granulated dredged on nut batter gives a crisp, pearled crust; in variation 6 the nuts are mingled with powdered sugar instead and dredged over the moist tops, where the sugar dissolves and re-crystallises into the fine matte bloom characteristic of lady fingers.
- YieldYield depends entirely on the size you drop them, since the recipe leaves that to fancy. Unfilled drops keep several days in a tin; once glazed or filled, serve the same day.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working American hotel and restaurant pastry cooks in the 1880s and 1890s, and this page shows how his books were organised: one economical base preparation, then a fan of variations that let a cook fill a petits-fours tray without mixing six batters. "Italian cakes" in the American trade of the period seems to have been a loose commercial label for small glazed and sandwiched sponge fancies rather than any specific regional Italian tradition — the same batter appears elsewhere as savoiardi, Naples biscuits, or simply lady fingers. The reliance on boiled sugar icings in several colours reflects a kitchen where confectioners judged boiled sugar by hand tests, and where the visual effect of a mixed plate mattered as much as the flavour.