The dying sponge fingers, and why it's time to bring them back on the table

A few days after Maharashtra’s ban on single use plastic came into force, when most retailers were resisting or confused, I stepped into a shop that showed how to do it. At the main outlet of the Sir Ratan Tata Institute (RTI) on Mumbai’s Hughes Road wafers, biscuits and other snacks were neatly packed in greaseproof paper. It was like plastic wrap had never existed.

A lot of things at RTI, which is 90 next year, are like that. It makes traditional dishes, both Parsi and ‘conti’, which are now almost entirely extinct in the restaurant world. Like Chicken Rainey Park, which is a rather weird dish of chicken breast baked in white sauce spiked with ham and pineapple chunks.

I was there to buy sponge fingers, which have also become almost extinct outside RTI. These long cylinders of plain cake are so dry they are halfway to being biscuits, and in fact Savoy biscuits is another name for them, after the Italian alpine kingdom that popularised them. Ladyfingers is another term, which nicely suggests their elegant shape and delicate, yet firm consistency.




A classic sponge is simultaneously one of the simplest yet trickiest cakes to make. “Few people realise the difficulties that confront them when trying their hands at making and baking a sponge cake for the first time,” wrote ‘Eve’, who wrote a cooking column in the Times of India in the 1930s. This is because it doesn’t use butter or any other fat, which otherwise easily gives cakes a pleasing consistency.

Sponges use just eggs, flour, sugar and flavouring, to get a result that is light and firm, but ready to disintegrate in the mouth to delicious effect. Their dryness, from lack of fat and long slow baking, allows them to soak up liquid like, well, a sponge, but stop short of disintegrating. Sponge fingers are delicious dunked in a hot cup of chai.

This absorbing ability made them indispensable during the British Raj, because of the near sacred requirement at that time that lunch and dinner had to end with a pudding. The easiest way to make one was to soak sponge fingers in sherry or coffee or some other sweet stimulating liquid, then cover them with custard or cream and nuts and fruits. Sponge fingers provided the perfect pudding foundation.

The pudding where they really make a difference links to their possible Italian origin. Tiramisu is now made with regular cake, which is too fatty, making the result too heavily clogging to enjoy. Sponge fingers give a lighter base, never sodden, but soaking up enough coffee to make it a real ‘pick me up’, which is what tiramisu means.

Sponge fingers disappeared, I think, because we forgot about the joys of good pudding (and ate too many bad ones). We now prefer more precisely engineered cakes and pastries. But puddings are worth rediscovering, and sponge fingers with them. It is one tradition worth learning from RTI, just like the greaseproof paper packaging it so easily revived.