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Chocolate Biscuits with Jam
Place four ounces powdered sugar in a bowl with five egg yolks, one saltspoon salt, a half teaspoon vanilla essence, and mix well with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Beat up the whites of the five eggs to a stiff froth, add to the yolks with three ounces sifted flour, and lightly mix with a skimmer. Line a lightly buttered small square pastry pan with lightly buttered paper, drop in the preparation, neatly smooth the surface, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, and set in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, let cool off, turn the cake on a clean table, lift up the paper and spread three tablespoons raspberry jam over surface of cake.
Prepare a glace au chocolate spread evenly over the jam and let cool off. Cut the cake in twelve even pieces, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, set in the oven for ten seconds, remove and serve.
This is a French biscuit — a whole-egg sponge, not a cookie — baked thin, layered with jam and glazed. The batter has no leavening beyond the beaten whites, so folding is the whole recipe.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" means finely granulated sugar, what we call caster sugar, not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold today. Four ounces is about half a cup plus a tablespoon; three ounces of flour is roughly two-thirds of a cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon holds about a quarter teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the egg flavour, not to season.
- The hinge: foldingThe yolk-sugar base must be beaten pale and thick for the full five minutes, then the whites and the sifted flour are added together and cut in with a few broad strokes, as the recipe directs. A "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon; a rubber spatula does the same work. Overmixing here collapses the foam and you get a thin rubbery slab.
- OvenA moderate oven is somewhere around 350F. No pan size is given beyond "small square"; twenty-five minutes suits a shallow sheet of batter, and the cake is done when the top springs back and the edges pull from the paper.
- Lining the panButter the pan, lay in parchment, butter the parchment. Modern parchment needs no greasing, but the buttered paper is what lets you peel it away cleanly while the cake is still slightly warm-cool, before the sponge dries.
- Glace au chocolatNo quantities are given; presumably the icing was covered elsewhere in the book or simply taken as known. It is a thin chocolate glaze of melted chocolate loosened with a little sugar syrup or cream, spread while just fluid. It should set firm enough to cut.
- Ten seconds in the ovenThe final flash of heat is presumably to bring the chocolate glaze back to a shine before serving. Ten seconds means ten seconds — leave the tray in and the glaze slumps into the jam.
- YieldTwelve small squares, best cut with a hot dry knife wiped between cuts.
The name confuses English readers because biscuit in French pastry means a sponge batter built on separately beaten yolks and whites, the same family as the sponge fingers sold as boudoir biscuits — nothing to do with an American baking-powder biscuit or a British cookie. The book draws on hotel and restaurant kitchens where a cook worked in French terms as a matter of course, which is why the icing is called for as glace au chocolat with no explanation at all: the reader was expected to know it, or to know a pastry cook who did. The layering of a thin sponge with raspberry jam under chocolate is the same logic as a Sachertorte or a Central European jam-and-chocolate slice, and thin sponge sheets cut into squares were a convenient way for a professional kitchen to turn one baking into a dozen uniform small cakes.