Lady Fingers
Two eggs, one cup sugar, one-half cup butter beaten to a cream, four tablespoons baking powder; enough flour to stir with a spoon; lemon to flavor. For your molding board take a little piece of dough, roll with your hands as large as your finger, cut off in four-inch lengths and put closely on buttered tins.
Quick oven.
This is a rolled cookie rather than the piped sponge finger sold under the same name today, and it needs two adjustments before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The baking powder is almost certainly a misprintThe baking powder figure looks like a misprint -- four tablespoons is about twelve teaspoons, several times the usual proportion for the two-odd cups of flour this batter takes, and would taste metallic and soapy. Two teaspoons is nearer what this quantity of flour wants, though bear in mind that some early powders were weaker than modern ones.
- "Quick oven"On the usual reckoning somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat fingers this thin need only a few minutes and will go from pale to scorched quickly, so watch them closely.
- "Enough flour to stir with a spoon"The dough must be stiff enough to roll under the palms without sticking, which lands around 2 to 2 1/2 cups. Add flour by the half cup and stop as soon as the mass leaves the side of the bowl.
- "Lemon to flavor"Most likely lemon extract, roughly a teaspoon, though zest or juice were also used. Zest from one lemon works and tastes better, but adds moisture, so hold back a spoonful of flour if you use it.
- Buttered tinsParchment on a flat sheet is easier and prevents the undersides browning before the centres set. Butter alone on a modern dark pan will overbrown them.
- Spacing"Closely" is the original intent: these spread little, and baked touching they stay soft-sided, which is what you want if they are going into a charlotte or trifle.
- YieldPerhaps two to three dozen four-inch fingers, depending how thickly you roll them. They keep in a tin and stale usefully, which is the point if they are to soak up syrup or custard.
The true ladyfinger is savoiardi, a piped egg-foam sponge traditionally associated with the court of Savoy and long used as the lining for charlottes, trifles and later tiramisu. What appears here is a different thing under the same name: a butter-and-baking-powder dough rolled into finger shapes by hand. Chemical leavening may be part of the explanation, since baking powder became cheap and widely available in American groceries from the 1860s onward.