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Lady Fingers or Naples Biscuits
8 ounces of powdered sugar. Quarter cupful of water--1/2 gill. 9 eggs. 10 ounces of flour.
Separate the eggs, the whites from the yolks, and set the whites on ice in a large bowl. Have the flour also in a cold place.
Put the sugar and water in a deep bright saucepan over the fire, add the yolks of the eggs and beat with a wire egg whisk till the mixture is warm but not hot--5 minutes. Then set the saucepan in a pan of cold water, and continue beating 15 minutes more till the mixture is become cold, thick and whitish and twice its original bulk. Whip the whites to a firm froth that will not fall out of the bowl up side down, and mix them lightly with the other and then stir in the flour, also without beating, and only stirred with a spoon sufficiently to hide it from light.
The above receipt is well worth learning as it is good for a great variety of Italian cakes and will not have to be repeated here, except as we shall show another way of doing the same thing.
To form the lady-fingers put some of the batter into the forcing sack having a tin tube in it from a quarter to half an inch in diameter, and force it out in finger lengths on sheets of blank paper, with an inch of space between each one. Sift powdered sugar plentifully all over them. Take hold of two corners of the sheet of paper (which may be of half newspaper size) and shake off the surplus sugar on to the table, and lay the sheet of cakes on a baking pan placed ready. Bake 8 or 10 minutes in a moderate oven, allowing the cakes to become no more than deep straw color.
To get the lady-fingers off the paper it is necessary to lay the sheet, cakes downwards, on a table and brush the paper over with water. The cakes will then peel off. Place them two together. The moisture will cause them to adhere.
A hand-built genoise-type sponge piped into fingers. The whole recipe hinges on air: everything is aimed at whipping volume into the yolks and whites and then not knocking it back out again.
- The measurements8 oz sugar and 10 oz flour are weights, not cups; use a scale. A gill is half a cup, so the quarter cupful of water is correctly given as half a gill. Nine eggs of modern large size give roughly a cup of whites and something over half a cup of yolks, though eggs of this period were not sold to a standard size.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period powdered sugar meant sugar ground and sifted fine, closer to modern superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch; it works for the dusting but caster sugar is the better choice for the batter.
- Warm, never hotThe yolk-and-syrup mixture should go no further than lukewarm; the recipe gives no temperature, only 'warm but not hot' after about five minutes. Push it further and the yolks begin to set into threads that beating will not smooth out. Whisk continuously and pull the pan off the heat early rather than late.
- The beatingFifteen minutes of hand whisking over cold water is what produces the pale, doubled, ribbon-thick foam. A stand mixer on medium-high does the same in five to eight minutes; the test is that a lifted whisk leaves a trail on the surface that holds for a few seconds.
- Folding in the flour"Only stirred with a spoon sufficiently to hide it from light" is the instruction that matters. Sift the flour over the surface in two or three additions and fold with a spatula until no dry streaks show, then stop. Overworking here is the usual cause of flat, tough fingers.
- Oven'Moderate' is usually read as somewhere around 350F. The eight to ten minutes the recipe gives suits fingers of this size; take them out at deep straw color, when the surface is set but the centers still spring back.
- Paper and release'Blank paper' means unprinted paper, as against the newspaper the author mentions only as a guide to sheet size. Parchment does the job and the cakes lift off without the wet-brushing trick; if you do use plain paper, the water method works exactly as described.
- Piping and yieldA plain tip of 1/4 to 1/2 inch, fingers about 3 to 4 inches long, spaced an inch apart as directed. A batch on this scale runs to several dozen fingers. They stale quickly and are at their best the day they are baked, though they are meant to dry out somewhat if they are going into a trifle or charlotte.
These are savoiardi, the Savoy biscuit, traditionally traced to the court of the Duchy of Savoy and made in versions across Italy and France for centuries; the English-speaking trade called them Naples biscuits, a name that appears in early English receipt books for the dry sponge fingers steeped in wine for trifles and creams. That is why the author treats the batter as a foundation rather than a single recipe: the same sugar-yolk foam, differently panned, gives sponge sheets, charlotte cases and a range of what he calls Italian cakes. The method itself, warming yolks with syrup and beating them cold again, is the older hand-labor route to a stable foam in a kitchen with no electric mixer, and the insistence on iced whites and chilled flour belongs to the same effort to keep the foam stable.