Savarin
1 yeast cake 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 5 tablespoonfuls lukewarm water 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls chopped almonds 1 cupful whipped cream
For Syrup
3/4 lb. lump sugar 3 cupfuls water 3 tablespoonfuls lemon juice For cake. Put yeast cake into cup, add 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 tablespoonful flour, and lukewarm water. Allow to rise ten minutes. Put flour into basin, add salt, remainder of sugar, almonds, yeast mixture, eggs well beaten, and Crisco melted and cooled. Beat ten minutes with wooden spoon. Turn into Criscoed tube mold. Allow to rise until doubled in size, then bake in quick oven forty-five minutes. Mold should be sprinkled over with shredded almonds. For syrup. Boil sugar and water for almost forty-five minutes, then add lemon juice. Soak cake with syrup and when cold serve with cream in center. Sufficient for one savarin.
This entry gives quantities only; the method has been lost in the setting of the page, so treat it as a formula rather than a procedure. A savarin is a rich yeast batter, closer to a very soft brioche than to a muffin dough, and the proportions here confirm that.
- No method givenThe original prints ingredients alone, with no mixing, rising or baking directions. Anyone working from it needs a current savarin or baba method to fill the gap; the amounts below are still useful as a guide to what the batter should contain.
- Yeast cakeOne yeast cake of the period was a compressed fresh cake of roughly 0.6 oz. Substitute about 2 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Five tablespoons of water is far too little to hydrate two cupfuls of flour on its own, so the eggs must supply much of the liquid; how the water was used is not stated.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Half a cupful of soft butter gives a better savarin and is what French practice calls for; the fat should be worked into the risen dough, not creamed at the start.
- A batter, not a doughTwo cupfuls of flour against three eggs and half a cupful of fat produces a slack, sticky batter that must be beaten rather than kneaded. Modern practice is to spoon it into a ring mould filled no more than halfway and let it rise to the rim; the original gives no direction.
- Oven heatNo baking direction survives here. A moderate oven, around 350 to 375F, for roughly 25 to 30 minutes suits a full ring, less for individual moulds; the cake should be deep gold and shrink slightly from the sides.
- The missing syrupA savarin is defined by its soaking. The ingredient list has no syrup, so the sugar here is only the small amount in the batter. The baked ring is drenched while still warm in hot sugar syrup flavoured with rum or kirsch — without that step this is simply a plain sweet bread.
- Cream and almondsThe whipped cream and chopped almonds are almost certainly finishing rather than batter ingredients: cream to fill the centre of the ring, almonds over the top or into the buttered mould before the batter. Whip the cream only to soft peaks so it does not seize against the warm cake.
- YieldTwo cupfuls of flour should fill roughly one 8- to 9-inch ring mould, serving six to eight, or about a dozen small individual savarins; the original states no yield.
The savarin is named for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the magistrate and author of Physiologie du Goût, though he had nothing to do with making it; the cake is generally traced to the Julien brothers, Paris pâtissiers of the mid-nineteenth century, who took the older baba au rhum, baked it in a ring rather than a tall mould and left out the raisins. Its distinguishing feature is not the batter but the treatment: a yeast cake baked dry enough to absorb a great deal of spirit-laced syrup. That it turns up in this book at all, built on Crisco, says a good deal about the early twentieth-century American cookbook trade — classic French pastry recruited to demonstrate that a new industrial shortening could do anything butter could.