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German Ladies Fingers
Helena Smith.
Beat the yolks of five eggs with half a pound of sugar for fifteen minutes; add half a pound of blanched almonds cut fine, the grated rind of one lemon; mix well; add half a pound of flour very gradually; roll out the paste and cut into strips the length and size of the forefinger; bake in a moderate oven.
A stiff almond-and-yolk paste rolled into finger-length strips, closer to a German Mandelstängeli than to the piped sponge ladyfinger. The original gives weights but no oven number, time or yield.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350°F. Start checking at about 10 minutes; pull them when the edges are pale gold and the tops still look matte.
- Weights into cupsHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated; half a pound of flour is roughly 1¾ cups; half a pound of blanched almonds is about 1½ cups whole, which is a great deal of nut for the flour and gives the dough its short, sandy body.
- The fifteen-minute beatingThis is the hinge. Yolks and sugar must be beaten to a thick, pale ribbon that holds a trail — there is no leavening and no egg white here, so all the lift comes from that aeration. A stand mixer does it in 6 to 8 minutes on high; by hand, take the full quarter hour.
- Add the flour gently"very gradually" at least implies unhurried incorporation; stirring hard once the flour is in will knock out the air built up during the long beating.
- Blanching the almondsCover them with boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off, then dry them well before chopping; damp almonds will slacken the paste. "Cut fine" means chopped to rice-grain size, not ground to meal — a food processor will turn them to paste if you let it run.
- Handling the pasteThe dough will be sticky and hard to roll. Chill it for an hour, then roll on a lightly floured surface to about ⅜ inch and cut strips roughly 3 inches by ¾ inch. Bake on parchment; the sugar and nut oil catch easily on a bare sheet.
- Yield and keepingExpect about four dozen fingers. They firm as they cool and keep a week in a tin — like most almond biscuits of this type they improve on the second day.
- The leftover whitesFive whites are left over. They can go into a meringue or a white cake, and they freeze well if you have neither in mind.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, first published in the mid-1870s) was compiled from recipes signed by named contributors — here Helena Smith — and sold for charity, a format that spread through American cities in the decades after the Civil War and preserved a good deal of immigrant home baking that never reached the professional cookbooks. The name "ladies' fingers" was applied loosely in the nineteenth century to almost any small, slim, finger-shaped biscuit; this one is not the piped egg-white sponge of a charlotte mould but a rolled almond dough, comparable to the German and Swiss almond sticks known as Mandelstängeli — though those are generally made with butter. Chicago in the 1870s had one of the largest German-speaking populations in the country.