Savarins
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 cups sifted flour 3/4 cup almonds, blanched and shredded 1/2 cup butter, melted 4 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt WHEN you want a dessert that is "different"--something for special occasions--serve Savarins made after this recipe. It is a dessert highly esteemed in France.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add one-half cup flour. Beat well. Cover and set aside in warm place, free from draught, for fifteen minutes. Then add rest of flour, almonds, butter, eggs unbeaten, one at a time, and the salt. Beat ten minutes. Pour into small well-buttered molds, cover and set aside to rise in warm place, free from draught, until double in bulk--about forty-five minutes.
Bake forty-five minutes in moderate oven. Fill center with whipped cream and serve with a hot sauce made as follows:
A yeast-raised almond batter baked in small molds, filled with whipped cream and sent out with a hot sauce. It is beaten and poured rather than kneaded, and the page stops mid-sentence: the sauce lives on the next one.
- The recipe is cut offThe text ends with a hot sauce “made as follows” and nothing following it. The sauce has its own entry in this book. Read it before starting, because these want the sauce hot and they come out of the oven on their own schedule.
- A whole cake of yeast for two cups of flourOne cake of compressed yeast — about two and a quarter teaspoons of active dry, or a single 7g sachet — is a great deal of leavening for two cups of flour. That is why forty-five minutes is enough for the rise here, where the plain doughs in this book take two hours. Half a cup of butter, four eggs and three-quarters of a cup of almonds all have to be lifted.
- Shredded almonds means sliveredBlanched and shredded describes what is now sold as slivered almonds: nuts cut lengthwise into strips, neither ground nor flaked. Three-quarters of a cup in a two-cup batter is a lot of almond, and it carries most of what the cake tastes of.
- Butter the molds past the point of cautionA batter this eggy and this buttery will still weld itself to a mold. Butter every flute and every corner, and dust with flour afterward unless the molds are nonstick. These are turned out, not served from the tin.
- Forty-five minutes suits larger moldsThat is a long bake for small ones, and the butter and almonds take color early. Start checking at twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven, around 350°F (175°C), and lay foil loosely over the tops if they darken before the centers are set.
- The syrup that is not hereIn French practice a savarin is drenched in syrup once baked, and the soaking is what turns a rather dry yeast cake into the dessert it is known as. This recipe moves that step to the table: the hot sauce does the work on the plate and the whipped cream fills the hollow. Serve the sauce genuinely hot, and more of it than seems sensible.
A savarin is a ring of yeast-raised cake built to absorb liquid, a close relation of the rum baba, and it is generally said to take its name from the gastronome Brillat-Savarin. The booklet claims only that it is highly esteemed in France and offers it as a dessert that is different, which is an honest account of the job it was doing on the page: a reader of this book was unlikely to have met one. That a yeast company reached for it makes sense. Most of what else might have closed a meal — layer cakes, pies, puddings — needed no yeast at all, and a French dessert that cannot exist without it was worth a page of the booklet on its own.