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Savarin Cake (Pound of good lively roll)
1 pound of good lively roll dough. 1 1/4 pounds of freshest butter. 6 ounces of sugar. 14 eggs. 1 pound of flour. 1/2 teacupful of brandy. 1/2 pound of almonds. Lemon or nutmeg extract.
This must be commenced five or six hours before the meal. For a midday dinner, take the roll dough, (or dough bought of a baker), at seven in the morning, put it in a pan with the sugar and butter and set in a warm corner to get all warmed through. In half an hour, beat them together, then begin adding the eggs two at a time and the flour a handful at a time. Beat like blitzen. It makes a soft batter like pound cake. Beat it some more against the side of the pan. Set it in a moderately warm place for about two hours, when it should be risen to about twice its original bulk, then beat again for five minutes; add the brandy and flavoring extract. Branch and shred the almonds. Strew them evenly over the insides of two buttered cake moulds; put in the batter with a spoon; set to rise in the moulds again about 1 1/2 hours, then bake in a slow oven about 1 hour, or according to size and depth of cakes. When nicely baked these cakes are of a rich orange color and quite spongy. Set them on the dish upside down; push a small funnel down in several places and by its means pour into the cake some hot orange syrup mixed with curacoa. Serve warm.
This is a yeast-raised cake in the brioche family, not a chemically leavened one, and the whole thing hinges on how the enriched dough is handled. Plan the five to six hours the author asks for; the timings are dictated by fermentation, not by the oven.
- "Lively roll dough"A pound of active, fully fermented white bread or roll dough — the whole leavening for the cake comes from it. Dough taken from a bakery mid-rise, or your own straight dough at the end of its first rise, both work; sluggish or over-proofed dough will not lift this much butter and egg.
- The butter and egg ratioA pound and a quarter of butter and 14 eggs against two pounds of dough and flour is extraordinarily rich even by brioche standards. Eggs of the period were smaller than ours: 14 of them may come to something like 1 1/2 lb in the shell, perhaps a dozen modern large eggs' worth of liquid; if your eggs are jumbo, hold two back.
- Adding the eggs graduallyTwo at a time, with flour between, helps keep the emulsion from breaking. Added all at once, the batter is more likely to curdle and turn greasy.
- "Beat like blitzen"Vigorous, sustained beating develops gluten in a batter too soft to knead — the slapping against the side of the pan is doing the same job as kneading on a bench. A stand mixer with the paddle on medium for eight to ten minutes achieves it.
- Warm corner, in numbersThe book gives no temperature; for a rich yeast batter, modern practice would suggest somewhere around 75-80F. Much warmer and the butter risks oozing out of the batter before the yeast has done its work.
- Half a teacupful of brandyPeriod teacups varied, commonly reckoned at 4 to 6 fl oz, so this is somewhere between 2 and 3 fl oz. Add it and the extract only at the last beating, as the author says; alcohol early on can slow the yeast.
- "Branch and shred the almonds"Almost certainly a slip for blanch. Pour boiling water over the almonds, slip the skins, then cut them lengthwise into slivers before pressing them onto the buttered mould.
- Slow oven300-325F. A rich yeast batter this deep needs the long, gentle bake; the cake is done at an internal temperature near 200F, which will be close to the hour given.
- The syrup and the funnelThe funnel trick is simply a way of getting hot syrup into the crumb without collapsing it — a skewer and a spoon do the same. Use a plain orange sugar syrup with a splash of curaçao, and pour it while both cake and syrup are hot so it absorbs rather than sitting on the surface.
- YieldTwo cake moulds; the recipe does not specify their shape, though a savarin is normally a ring. Serve warm, the same day.
The savarin is the ring-shaped, syrup-soaked descendant of the baba, generally traced to the Paris pastry house of the Julien brothers in the 1840s, who are said to have named it in tribute to the gastronomic writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin; both cakes are steeped after baking, and the distinction usually drawn is that the savarin omits the baba's raisins. What makes this version interesting is the shortcut it allows: rather than building a yeast sponge from scratch, the cook may use a pound of roll dough, bought of a baker if convenient. The instruction to begin at seven for a midday dinner is a reminder that a yeasted cake was a whole morning's undertaking, and that in this period such baking ran on fermentation rather than on baking powder.