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Chocolate Biscuit
Four ounces flour, one ounce melted butter, four ounces fine sugar, one ounce grated chocolate, one teaspoon vanilla essence and three eggs. Place the sugar, vanilla and eggs in a copper basin and sharply whisk up for eight minutes, then add the chocolate and flour, gently mix for one minute with a skimmer; add the butter, mix again for a minute. Then drop the preparation into a lightly buttered small pastry pan and bake in a slack oven for ten minutes. Remove, sprinkle two tablespoons fine sugar over. Cut the cake into six equal pieces and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
A whole-egg foam sponge in the French manner, baked thin and cut into squares. Everything depends on the eggs, since there is no chemical leavening at all.
- "Biscuit" means sponge cakeThis is the French biscuit — a foam-raised sponge — not a cookie or an American baking-powder biscuit. The finished sheet should be tender and cakelike; the recipe gives no pan size or depth, so the thickness is a matter of judgement.
- Weights, in modern termsFour ounces of flour is about 115 g, or a scant cup scooped and levelled; four ounces of sugar is 115 g, roughly a generous half cup. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons, one ounce of grated chocolate is about 30 g. Weigh if you can — the flour-to-sugar balance is exact and the recipe has no margin.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" here most likely means a hard block grated to a powder, unsweetened or only lightly sweetened. Grated 100% or 70% chocolate both work; the ounce is for flavour and colour, not structure, so it will read as a pale mocha rather than a dark devil's food.
- The copper basinCopper is traditional for beating eggs, though the stabilising effect is best documented for whites rather than whole-egg foams; any deep bowl and a stand mixer will do. Eight minutes of sharp hand-whisking is roughly comparable to four or five minutes on high with a machine — stop when the mixture falls from the whisk in a ribbon that sits on the surface for a couple of seconds.
- Warm the eggsThe recipe says nothing about egg temperature, but eggs at kitchen temperature whip to greater volume than cold ones. Setting them in warm water for ten minutes first helps; a génoise-style batter whipped straight from the refrigerator will be slower to aerate and rise less.
- Folding, not mixingThe skimmer is a flat perforated spoon, here used to cut and fold. One minute of gentle folding for the flour and chocolate, one more for the butter — a rubber spatula does the same job. Overworking here deflates the foam and gives a dense, rubbery slab.
- The butter goes in last, and warmMelted butter is heavy and will sink and knock the air out if it is poured in cold or in one stream. Fold it in around the edge of the bowl in a thin drizzle, still just warm.
- Oven temperatureA slack oven is a cool one, somewhere around 250–300°F, which is unlikely to set a sponge in ten minutes. For a thin sheet in a shallow pan, 350°F for 10 to 12 minutes is the practical reading; the cake is done when it springs back and the edges pull from the pan.
- YieldOne shallow pastry pan, size unspecified in the original, cut into six pieces. Dusted with sugar and served plain on a napkin-lined dish, it is a teatime cake rather than a dessert.
This is a plain biscuit in the French pastry sense — a batter leavened entirely by whipped whole eggs, the family that includes the biscuit de Savoie, the ladyfinger and the génoise. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in 1906 from the professional repertoire he had worked in, and the vocabulary here is a kitchen brigade's rather than a housewife's: the copper basin, the skimmer used for folding, the instruction to serve on a folded napkin, often said to be the usual hotel presentation for anything dry and sugar-dusted. The recipe's brevity assumes a reader who already knows what a properly whipped egg foam looks like. It is worth remembering how recent chemical leavening still was in professional pastry: an egg-foam sponge like this one predates baking powder by centuries and remained the mark of a trained hand well into the twentieth century.