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Savarin
4 eggs 1 cake compressed yeast 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoons sugar 2 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter, melted 3/4 cup almonds, shredded 1/4 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk; add one half cup of flour. Beat well; cover and set aside in a warm place, free from draft, for fifteen minutes. Then add the rest of the flour, almonds, butter, eggs unbeaten, one at a time, and the salt. Beat ten minutes; pour into thickly buttered molds; cover and set aside to rise in a warm place, free from draft, until double in bulk -about forty-five minutes. Bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Fill the center with whipped cream and serve with caramel sauce. 2 eggs
A yeast-raised ring cake in the French style, written for a cook who already knows what a savarin mold looks like. A few details in the original need translating.
- The stray "2 eggs"The line at the end appears to belong to a neighbouring recipe on the leaf. Ignore it; the savarin itself takes the four eggs listed at the top.
- Compressed yeastOne cake of compressed yeast was about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast.
- Lukewarm milkScalding was routine with unpasteurised milk, and is usually explained as destroying enzymes and organisms that interfere with the dough; with modern milk it is generally treated as optional, but the temperature matters. Cool to 100-110F before the yeast goes in.
- Moderate oven350F. Forty-five minutes is generous for a ring mold — start checking at 30 minutes, and expect an internal temperature around 200F when done.
- The moldsA savarin mold is a shallow ring, typically 8 to 9 inches; a plain tube pan or several individual ring molds will serve. Butter thickly as instructed, since this is an enriched dough that sticks.
- Beat ten minutesThis is a batter, not a kneadable dough. Ten minutes by hand with a wooden spoon, or eight to ten on medium with a stand mixer paddle, develops the gluten that gives the crumb its characteristic elastic, spongy chew.
- Adding the eggsUnbeaten, one at a time, is deliberate — the batter will look broken after each addition and come back together with beating. Do not rush it.
- The missing syrupA classic savarin is drenched in hot rum or kirsch syrup the moment it comes from the mold. This recipe sends it straight to whipped cream and caramel sauce, which leaves a noticeably drier cake; a soaking syrup is worth considering.
- YieldOne 8- to 9-inch ring, serving eight to ten. The caramel sauce is not given here and will need a separate recipe.
The savarin is a nineteenth-century Parisian refinement of the baba, the rum-soaked yeast cake said by tradition to have come to France from Poland by way of the exiled king Stanislas Leszczyński's household. It is generally credited to the Julien brothers, pâtissiers in Paris in the 1840s, who baked the dough in a ring mold rather than the tall baba tin and named it for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste. The hollow center is the whole point: it holds cream, fruit or custard, and the ring shape lets syrup penetrate a dough that is otherwise slow to absorb. Its appearance in an American loose-leaf cookbook of the early twentieth century reflects the period's steady borrowing from French pâtisserie for the dessert course, though the almonds worked into the batter and the caramel sauce are domestic touches rather than classical ones.