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Four Eggs (Five ounces of Butter)
Five ounces of Butter.
Shredded Almonds or Cocoanut.
Warm one gill of milk, mix the yeast and sugar together, and stir the warm milk to them.
Sift the flour into a basin, make a well in the middle, and pour in the milk with the yeast and sugar in it; just mix a little flour with it, and put it in a warm place to rise. When this sponge has risen to twice its original size, add to it two eggs; beat it well with the hand, adding by degrees the other two eggs and the butter beaten to a cream. Work all this well together; butter a border mould and sprinkle it over with shredded almonds or cocoanut; pour the mixture into this mould until it is half full, cover it with a cloth and set it in a warm place to rise until it fills the mould, then bake it for forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Turn it out, and when cold pour a good syrup over it, and fill the centre of the mould with preserved fruits.
This is a savarin — a yeast-raised butter cake baked in a ring mould and soaked in syrup. The printed ingredient list has been clipped, so quantities for flour, yeast and sugar are missing and must be judged against the four eggs and five ounces of butter.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the butter (5 oz, about 140 g), the eggs and the gill of milk survive. A savarin of this scale normally takes around 8–10 oz of flour, an ounce of sugar and roughly 15 g fresh yeast (about 5 g instant); treat those as an informed reconstruction rather than the book's own figures.
- A gill5 imperial fluid ounces, about 140 ml. Warm the milk to blood heat only — hot milk will kill the yeast before the sponge starts.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350°F / 175°C; the book gives no temperature and 'moderate' covered a range. Forty-five minutes is right for a full-sized ring; check at thirty-five, since a ring bakes faster than a loaf and the sugared crust colours early.
- The hinge: butter goes in last and softThe butter must be beaten to a cream, not melted, and worked in gradually after the eggs. Melted butter will slacken the dough into a batter that never holds its rise.
- Two risings, and the second is the one to watchThe sponge doubles, then the moulded dough rises to fill the mould. Let it reach the rim and no further — an over-proofed savarin collapses in the oven and drinks syrup unevenly.
- CocoanutThe book's spelling for desiccated coconut. Either that or shredded blanched almonds are pressed into the buttered mould so they stick to the cake when it is turned out; expect them to toast dark at the mould's contact points.
- "A good syrup"Unspecified, and traditionally a sugar syrup around 1 part sugar to 1 part water, boiled briefly and flavoured with rum, kirsch or lemon. The cake should be barely warm and the syrup hot for it to soak in rather than sit on the surface; this recipe, however, directs that the cake be cold when the syrup goes on.
- YieldNo size or yield is given; a standard 8–9 inch ring would serve roughly eight to ten. Probably best eaten the day it is soaked, as the crumb softens after a night in the syrup.
The savarin belongs to a small family of yeast cakes soaked after baking, generally traced to the baba of eastern and central Europe, which reached Parisian pastry counters in the early nineteenth century; the ring-moulded, syrup-drenched version is conventionally credited to the Julien brothers, who are said to have named it for Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du goût. By the time British high-class cookery manuals were written for professional and upper-servant kitchens at the end of the century, the savarin had become a standard entremets — a dish that showed off a cook's command of yeast doughs, enriched with butter and eggs on a scale no ordinary bread would justify, then finished at the table with syrup and preserved fruits piled in the well. Its appearance among "Fancy Bread and Cakes" rather than among puddings is telling: to a Victorian professional cook this was still bread work, raised and proved, and only afterwards dressed as a dessert.