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Petites Espagnoles
Place in a basin half pound fine sugar, crack eight fresh eggs and add two tablespoons orange flavouring. Set the basin on the corner of the range and briskly beat up with the whisk for fifteen minutes, remove the basin to a table and gradually add half pound sifted flour, continually mixing with a skimmer while adding it. Slide a tube an inch in diameter to the bottom of a clean pastry bag and drop the preparation in. Lightly butter and flour a pastry pan, then with the hand press down the preparation in the pan into pieces the size of a fifty-cent piece, keeping them an inch apart from each other; proceed in the same way until the batter is used up. Dredge one ounce shredded cocoanut over them and set in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove, let cool off and serve.
N. B.--These cakes will keep in good condition for two weeks when kept in a tin placed in a cool place, and can be employed for cake crumbs, etc.
A warm-whisked sponge batter piped into small drops — essentially the ladyfinger family in coin form. The method is sound; what the original leaves out is the oven temperature and any sense of yield.
- The hinge: whisk warm, fold coolSetting the basin on the corner of the range brings the eggs and sugar to about blood heat, which is what lets them whip to a thick, pale ribbon that holds. Once off the heat the flour goes in gently and quickly; overworking at that stage knocks out the air and the drops bake flat and tough.
- Fifteen minutes with a whiskThat timing assumes hand whisking. A stand mixer on high will reach the ribbon stage — batter falling in a thick trail that sits on the surface for several seconds — in five to eight minutes.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of sugar is 8 oz (about 1 1/8 cups of caster sugar) and half a pound of sifted flour is 8 oz (about 2 cups sifted, though this is a recipe worth weighing). Eggs of the period may run a little smaller than today's large eggs; eight large eggs is close enough.
- Orange flavouringTwo tablespoons suggests orange flower water or an orange-flavoured cordial rather than a modern concentrated extract, of which two tablespoons would be overwhelming. Use orange flower water at the stated quantity, or about two teaspoons of extract plus the zest of an orange.
- SkimmerA flat perforated spoon. A large silicone spatula does the folding better and with less deflation.
- Size and spacingA fifty-cent piece is about 1 1/4 inches across. Pipe rounds of that size an inch apart; they spread modestly. A 1-inch plain tube is correct.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Ten minutes for a small sponge drop means a fairly brisk oven, 375-400F, baked until the edges are just coloured and the tops spring back.
- CoconutAn ounce of shredded coconut over the whole batch is a light dusting, not a coating. Desiccated coconut of the period was generally drier than most bagged sweetened shred sold now; unsweetened flake is the closer match.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly five to seven dozen drops. The note about two weeks in a tin is plausible for a lean sponge with no fat in it — they stale into exactly the dry crumb the author points to for cake crumbs.
Petites espagnoles — "little Spanish ones" — belong to the large family of warm-whisked sponge biscuits that French professional kitchens turned out by the tray: biscuits à la cuillère, boudoir biscuits, ladyfingers, all the same batter of eggs, sugar and flour with no butter and no chemical leavening, differing mainly in shape and finish. The Spanish tag looks decorative rather than geographic; nineteenth-century pastry nomenclature often attached national names to shapes and garnishes, and here the distinguishing marks are the round coin form and the scatter of coconut. The closing note — that they keep in a tin and can be used for cake crumbs — reads like a professional's book, where nothing in the pastry room is allowed to go to waste. If the source is Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, it fits that habit of mind.