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Finger Biscuits
14 ounces of granulated sugar--2 cups. 8 eggs. 6 tablespoonfuls of water. 12 ounces of flour--2 heaping cups.
Separate the eggs, the whites into a good sized bowl, the yolks into the mixing pan. Put the sugar to the yolks and stir up then add the water and they can be beaten to a thick foam. It may take 10 minutes. Have the flour ready. Whip the whites with the wire egg-whisk till they are firm enough to bear up an egg. Mix the flour in the yolks and stir in the whipped whites last. Lay the mixture in small finger-lengths with a lady-finger tube and sack or a paper cornet, on a sheet of blank paper. Sift powdered sugar over them plentifully, catch up two corners of the sheet and shake off the surplus. Lay the sheet on a baking pan.
Bake about 6 minutes. Take off by wetting the paper under side and stick the cakes together while they are still moist.
This is a classic sponge-batter ladyfinger, piped and dusted rather than panned. The batter is nothing but eggs, sugar and flour, so the handling is the recipe.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whipped whites go in last and must be folded, not beaten, into the yolk-and-flour base. Once the foam is knocked down the fingers spread flat and bake into wafers instead of holding a plump ridge.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Six minutes for a thin piped sponge implies a hot oven, on the order of 400-425F; the fingers should set and take faint colour without drying through.
- Beat the yolks properlyTen minutes of beating yolks, sugar and water to a thick foam is not an exaggeration. With a stand mixer on high it is more like five to six minutes, and the mixture should fall from the whisk in a wide pale ribbon.
- Egg sizeEight eggs; weigh if you can, aiming for roughly 14-15 oz of whole egg out of shell against the 14 oz sugar and 12 oz flour.
- Flour by weight"Two heaping cups" is the author's rough equivalent for 12 ounces, which is heavier than a modern level-cup measure. Go by the 12 oz, and use plain all-purpose flour, sifted.
- "Bear up an egg"The old test for whites stiff enough to float a whole egg on the foam. In modern terms, firm peaks that hold their shape but still look glossy, not dry and curdled.
- The paper"Blank paper" is plain unprinted sheet. Parchment or a silicone mat does the same job and skips the next step entirely.
- Wetting the paperDamping the underside of the sheet to release the biscuits was the old fix for bare paper. With parchment, let the fingers cool a minute and lift them off; do not soak modern parchment, which will not release any better for it.
- Sugar and shakingThe heavy dusting of powdered sugar, then tipping the sheet to shed the surplus, gives the pearled, crackled top of a proper savoiardi. Dust twice, a minute apart, if you want a heavier crust.
- Sticking them togetherPairing two fingers back to back while still moist is the traditional finish, and it only works in the first minute or two out of the oven.
- YieldNot stated. This batter makes roughly five to six dozen fingers of about four inches, or half that number of pairs.
Finger biscuits are the English-language name for what Italian bakers call savoiardi and the French biscuits à la cuiller -- spoon biscuits, from the days when the batter was shaped with two spoons. The form is traditionally traced to the court of Savoy, and the name "lady finger" appears in American usage by the middle of the nineteenth century. For a working pastry cook these were a staple of the trade rather than a treat in themselves: they lined charlottes russes and were split for trifles. The bare batter -- eggs, sugar, flour, a little water and no chemical leavening at all -- is a reminder that a whisk and a beaten egg foam were the only rising agents this recipe expected.