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Lady Fingers (Cup powdered sugar Yolks eggs)
Whites 3 eggs. 1/3 cup powdered sugar Yolks 2 eggs 1/3 cup flour 1/8 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon vanilla Beat whites of eggs until stiff and dry, add sugar gradually, and continue beating. Then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, and flavoring. Cut and fold in flour mixed and sifted with salt. Shape four and one-half inches long and one inch wide on a tin sheet covered with unbuttered paper, using a pastry bag and tube. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and bake eight minutes in a moderate oven.
Remove from paper with a knife. Lady Fingers are much used for lining moulds that are to be filled with whipped cream mixtures. They are often served with frozen desserts, and sometimes put together in pairs with a thin coating of whipped cream between, when they are attractive for children's parties.
A plain sponge batter piped into fingers, from the era when every well-run kitchen kept a pastry bag ready for charlotte moulds. The whole thing depends on how much air you keep in the eggs.
- The egg whitesThe method calls for beaten whites, and the batter cannot work without them: two eggs are separated, the whites whipped stiff with the sugar and the yolks folded in after. Nothing else lifts these biscuits.
- ProportionsAs printed, the sugar quantity is out of scale with a third of a cup of flour and two eggs. A workable ratio for two eggs is roughly a third of a cup each of powdered sugar and flour; the vanilla is a quarter teaspoon.
- Powdered sugarA fine-ground sugar of the period, closer to modern superfine or caster sugar than to granulated; confectioners' sugar was listed separately as a finer grade, so the two are not simply interchangeable.
- A moderate ovenConventionally reckoned at about 350F, though the book gives no figures. Eight minutes is right for fingers this size; they should be set and barely coloured at the edges, still pale on top.
- Unbuttered paperThe recipe specifies no grease, the usual practice for sponge batters. Parchment is the modern equivalent and generally releases without the knife.
- FoldingSift the flour and salt together and cut it in with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate it. Stirred batter spreads flat instead of holding the piped shape.
- Piping and sugarA plain round tube, fingers about four and a half inches long and an inch wide as directed, spaced well apart. The dusting of sugar before baking gives the pearled crust.
- Yield and keepingTwo eggs make a small batch; the recipe gives no yield. They stale fast but that is an advantage for lining a charlotte mould, where a dry biscuit absorbs cream without collapsing.
Lady fingers are the English name for the piped sponge biscuit the French call biscuit à la cuillère, spoon biscuit, from the days before pastry bags when the batter was dropped from two spoons. Their place in a book like this is structural rather than sentimental: they were the standard lining for charlotte russe, the moulded whipped-cream dessert that was a fixture of American company dinners through the late nineteenth century, which is why Farmer's note dwells on moulds and frozen desserts before it gets to children's parties. The same biscuit, under its Italian name savoiardi, is what later went into tiramisu. A cook who could pipe even fingers and get them off the paper whole was demonstrating the kind of controlled sponge work the Boston Cooking School was built to teach.