No. 3289

Biscuits in Cases with Cream

Biscuits en Caisses a la Creme

Choose eight fresh eggs; break the whites into a basin and the yolks into a bowl; into the latter mingle two ounces of powdered sugar flavored with grated lemon peel (No. 3165), and beat it up with a spoon until it becomes white; add a grain of salt to the whites, beating them very stiff, and mix them slowly with the yolks, sifting four ounces of good flour over the whole; lastly add a gill of well-drained whipped cream, and with this preparation fill some oblong paper cases (Fig. 548) three-quarters full; range them on a thin baking sheet, glaze the surfaces with fine sugar, and cook for twenty-five minutes in a slack oven.

← No. 3288 Babas with Rum—Small Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3290 Banana Boats →

For the Modern Kitchen

A French sponge batter (biscuit, not a cracker) baked in paper cases. It is a genoise-type mixture leavened entirely by whipped egg, so the folding and the low oven are the whole recipe.

Fold, do not stirOnce the stiff whites go into the yolks, everything after that is a folding operation — whites, sifted flour, then cream. There is no chemical leavening and no liquid but the cream, so any deflation is permanent.
A gillHalf a cup, and here it is the whipped cream that is measured, after it has been drained of weeping liquid: whip cream, let it drain in a sieve, and measure out a gill of what holds together.
A slack ovenRanhofer gives no temperature; 'slack' is usually read today as somewhere around 300F, at the low end of the range. The point of the low heat is to set the sponge through rather than colour it: in a hotter oven it will dome and crack before the centre is cooked.
Lemon sugarNo. 3165 is the cross-reference for sugar flavoured with grated lemon peel; rub the 2 oz of powdered sugar with grated zest until fragrant and use it directly. Ranhofer does not state how much zest here.
The proportions are correctEight eggs to 2 oz sugar and 4 oz flour looks wrong to a modern eye, but this is a lean, barely sweet sponge meant to be eaten alongside something else, with a dusting of sugar on top.
Glaze with fine sugarThis means dusting the surface with caster or powdered sugar just before baking, not a poured icing. It melts and forms a thin crackled crust.
Paper casesOblong paper cases (Fig. 548) are essentially small paper loaf moulds; stiff parchment cases or petit-four paper moulds work. Set them on a thin sheet so the bottoms do not overbake, and fill only three-quarters full — the batter rises well.
Yield and servingExpect roughly 18–24 small cases from eight eggs, depending on size. They stale fast; serve the day they are baked, with fruit, a cream or an ice.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised like a professional's reference book rather than a household manual — hence the cross-reference to No. 3165 for the lemon sugar. These belong to the entremets section, the small sweet items served toward the end of a long menu, where a plain sponge was valued precisely for being light after several rich courses. The word biscuit here carries its French sense of a whipped-egg sponge, the same family as biscuit de Savoie and the ladyfinger, and has nothing to do with the American quick bread or the British cracker. Baking in individual paper caisses was standard in nineteenth-century pastry work: the case supported a fragile batter, insulated it in the oven, and went to the table as its own serving dish.