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Small Savoy Cakes or Savoy Biscuits
Make the same batter as for lady-fingers and flavor it with vanilla. Bake it either in small paper cases made on writing paper, or in jem or patty pans fastened together by the dozen. Prepared the cases or pans by brushing them over with clear melted butter and shaking powdered sugar about in them instead of flour as with other cakes, and sift powdered sugar over the tops of the cakes before baking. These cakes bake quickly and should be light colored.
A variation entry that leans on the book's lady-finger batter, so the hinge is in a recipe printed elsewhere. Everything here concerns the pan, the sugar and the speed of the bake.
- The batter it refers toA lady-finger batter is a whole-egg sponge built by whipping yolks with sugar, folding in stiff whites, then sifting in flour. A workable proportion for this period is 4 eggs, about 1/2 cup fine sugar and about 1/2 cup flour, with a teaspoon of vanilla here. Fold the flour in with as few strokes as will incorporate it; the batter is leavened by air alone.
- Sugar instead of flour in the pansDusting the buttered moulds with sugar rather than flour helps the cake release from the tin and can leave a faint crisp coating rather than the pale floury film flour would give on a cake baked this briefly and this light.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1900"Powdered sugar" here -- In American books of this era powdered sugar usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match for coating the pans; modern confectioners' sugar is fine for the dusting over the tops.
- Jem pans"Jem" is gem, the cast-iron gem pans of the period, which came in gangs of a dozen cups joined by a frame. A standard mini-muffin or shallow muffin tin does the same work; grease and sugar each cup individually.
- Paper casesCases folded from writing paper were a common improvisation before pleated liners were sold. Paper baking cups or squares of parchment pressed into a tin give the same result, and still want the butter-and-sugar treatment inside.
- Oven and time"Bake quickly" implies a fairly hot oven for a sponge this small, something in the region of 375-400F, with only a few minutes in it; watch rather than time them. Pull them when the tops are set and barely blond, since the book insists they should be light coloured.
- Yield and keepingThe four-egg batter above should fill roughly two dozen small cases. Like other sponges leavened by egg alone and made without added butter, they stale quickly and are best the day they are baked; day-old ones are better served with cream or fruit.
History: Savoy biscuit, biscuit de Savoie, belongs to the family of egg-leavened sponges made without added butter that also includes lady-fingers, and it is traditionally traced to the court of Savoy in the fourteenth century, a story generally repeated in pastry books without documentation. What is certain is that by the nineteenth century the batter was a working pastry-kitchen staple in Europe and America: cheap in ingredients, leavened entirely by beaten egg, and adaptable to a large moulded cake or, as here, to dozens of small ones. Its usefulness was that one bowl of batter could be piped into fingers for charlottes and trifles or dropped into gem pans for a tea tray, with no change but the vessel and the dusting of sugar.