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White Jelly Drops
The same mixture as number 3. Make drop cakes same as lady fingers, well glazed by letting the siftings of powdered sugar lie upon them a few minutes before baking.
When done sandwich a slice of good wine jelly between two, and keep cold until time of serving.
A two-line instruction that assumes you already have the batter from an earlier entry and a pan of set wine jelly in the larder. Both assumptions need filling in before you start.
- The missing batter"Number 3" is a preceding recipe in the same sequence, not an ingredient. Its composition is not given here; the page only tells you to form the drops as you would lady fingers. A standard lady finger/savoiardi formula -- eggs beaten with sugar, folded with sifted flour, no butter or leavening -- is the closest workable substitute, though the title may indicate a whites-only mixture.
- Piping and pairingPipe rounds rather than fingers here, since they are to be sandwiched. Keep them uniform in size and pipe them in pairs so the halves match; roughly 1½ inches across gives a two-bite cake.
- The glaze is the hingeDust the piped shapes heavily with powdered sugar and leave them three to five minutes before baking. The sugar draws moisture out of the surface and dissolves into a thin syrup, which bakes to the pearled, crackled shell that gives these their gloss. Bake immediately after the sugar has gone damp; longer and the batter deflates.
- OvenBake at 350-375F for 8-12 minutes, until set and pale gold at the edges. These are meant to stay light in colour; a dark bake makes them brittle and the wine jelly will not soften them back.
- Wine jellyA period wine jelly is typically sugar, water, lemon and sherry, Madeira or claret, set with gelatine (isinglass or calf's-foot stock in older versions), poured into a shallow pan and cut into slices. The recipe's "slice" implies it must be cut stiff enough to lift with a knife; a soft dessert-style jelly will slump between the cakes.
- Assemble lateMoisture migrates between sponge and gelatine and the jelly will begin to weep; the recipe's own instruction to keep them cold until serving points the same way. Sandwich them as close to service as you can manage and hold them refrigerated, uncovered or lightly covered, so the shells stay crisp.
- YieldThe original gives none, and the batter is the unlisted number 3. As a rough guide, a three-egg lady finger batter piped at this size gives somewhere around 40 rounds, or about 20 sandwiched drops.
Lady fingers were the workhorse of the nineteenth-century pastry department: cheap in materials, quick to pipe, and the base for charlottes, trifles and dozens of small iced fancies. The trick given here, letting sifted sugar sit on the raw batter until it goes damp, is the standard professional method for the pearled crust and appears in French and American manuals alike. Wine jelly, meanwhile, was a fixture of the Victorian invalid tray and the supper table both, valued because gelatine had by then become reasonably reliable and inexpensive. Combining the two is characteristic of a working pastry kitchen, where a cook was expected to build new items out of components already standing in the shop rather than start anything from scratch.