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Sauce for Savarins
1 cup sugar 1/2 cup water BOIL to syrup--about three minutes--and flavor with orange or lemon juice.
Two ingredients and three minutes. It is a plain sugar syrup for soaking a savarin, and the page leaves out nearly as much as it states.
- What the proportions giveOne cup of sugar to half a cup of water is a heavy syrup, two parts sugar to one of water, and three minutes at a boil concentrates it further. That suits a cake meant to be saturated rather than brushed, but it thickens fast as it cools and is far easier to use hot.
- Add the juice off the heatThe orange or lemon juice goes in after boiling, and should not be boiled with the syrup, which drives off the aromatics that are the reason for adding it. No quantity is given. The juice of one orange, or half a lemon, into this amount of syrup is a fair reading, with more added to taste once the pan is off the stove.
- Hot syrup, cooled cakeThe soak works on the difference between them. A warm savarin flooded with hot syrup collapses into paste; a cooled one set in a dish and spooned over repeatedly takes the syrup up and keeps its structure. Catch what runs through and spoon it back.
- Swirl, do not stirA sugar syrup crystallizes from a single grain carried in on a spoon or left on the side of the pan. Swirl the pan instead of stirring it, and wash the sides down with a wet brush if grains appear. Three minutes is short enough that it rarely goes wrong, and a grainy syrup is easier to start again than to rescue.
- This is not the classic soakA savarin is conventionally steeped in a syrup carrying rum or kirsch. This one has neither, and the page does not acknowledge the absence. Made as written it is sweeter and flatter than the French original. A tablespoon or two of rum stirred in off the heat puts it back.
The savarin is a yeast-raised cake baked in a ring and made worth eating by what is poured over it; unsoaked it is dry and ordinary. It descends from the rum baba and takes its name from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French magistrate whose Physiologie du goût made him the figure every pastry cook wanted attached to a dish. The soak is traditionally alcoholic. This one, printed in 1920, is sugar, water and citrus juice. The Eighteenth Amendment had taken effect in January of that year, and a national company printing a syrup for savarins had little reason to put rum in it. Nothing on the page marks the omission, which is what makes it interesting: it is one of the quieter traces Prohibition left in American recipe writing, visible only to a reader who already knows what the dish is supposed to be.