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Savarin Pudding
A large bisquit de savoie partly saturated with a fine liqueur and served hot with cream.
Prepare one or two cake moulds by brushing over with the clear part of melted butter. When cold and set, or nearly so, sift in some powdered sugar to coat the moulds, and turn out the surplus. Then make the cake. 14 ounces of granulated sugar. 12 eggs. 12 ounces of flour--good weight. 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract. 1/4 pint of brandy.
Have the ingredients all quite cold. Beat the sugar and eggs in a round bottomed kettle, with a arge wire egg-whisk, half an hour by the clock. Then "cut in," or lightly stir in the flour with a spoon, then the extract and brandy. When all the flour is out of sight stop stirring and bake the cakes as soon as you can. Sift granulated sugar on top before baking. Have a moderate oven and not the least dark color about the cakes. They bake easily in about half an hour.
When done pour into them through holes made with a knife point or funnel about a pint of nice lemon or orange syrup with half as much curacoa or maraschino mixed in. Serve with either hot cream sweetened or a plain custard in the saucers.
In about forty-nine out of every fifty places where these puddings are made they have to be baked in ranges or stoves, and take their chance for their turn with meats, fishes, pies, potatoes, parsnips, etc., etc., so that special attentions and graduated fires are out of the question. With the utmost respect for the fiftieth, the writer avows a greater desire to be of service to the forty-nine, and for an easier way recommends the annexed.
This is a Savoy sponge (a whole-egg genoise, leavened by nothing but beaten eggs) baked in a mould, then flooded with liqueur syrup and served hot. The hinge is the beating: all the lift comes from air held in the egg-and-sugar foam, so the flour must go in with a light hand and the cakes must reach the oven immediately.
- Weigh, do not measure14 oz granulated sugar is about 2 cups; 12 oz flour "good weight" is roughly 2 3/4 cups sifted, and the author's insistence on generous weight suggests he wanted the fuller end of that range. Twelve eggs is about 600 g / 1 lb 5 oz of whole egg. Use a scale and the proportions hold together.
- A gill, a pint1/4 pint of brandy is 1/2 cup. The soaking liquid is about a pint (2 cups) of citrus syrup with half as much again of curacao or maraschino, so roughly 3 cups in total for one or two cakes.
- Half an hour by the clockThat is hand-whisking time in a round-bottomed kettle. A stand mixer with the whisk reaches the same ribbon stage in 8 to 12 minutes on high: the foam should fall from the whisk in a thick trail that sits on the surface for several seconds before sinking.
- "Quite cold" is his choice, not modern practiceCold eggs whip more slowly and to less volume; modern practice for a whole-egg sponge is usually to bring them to room temperature, or to warm the eggs and sugar over a water bath. Why he wanted everything quite cold he does not say. Room-temperature eggs will give a lighter cake if you stop at the ribbon stage.
- The brandy thins the batterHalf a cup of spirit folded into a finished foam will slacken it noticeably. Add it last, in a thin stream, with as few strokes as possible, and get the pans in the oven at once "when all the flour is out of sight."
- Moderate oven, no colourThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F. Because he wants no dark colour at all, 325F in a modern oven may be safer for a deep mould; check at 30 minutes with a skewer, and tent loosely with foil if the top is browning before the centre sets.
- Clarified butter and a sugar lining"The clear part of melted butter" is clarified butter, brushed on and left to set cold, then dusted with powdered sugar and the surplus knocked out. The milk solids in whole butter stick; clarified butter plus sugar gives the crisp shell that lets a fragile sponge release.
- Soak in stagesPour the syrup in through knife-point holes while the cake is still warm, a ladleful at a time, waiting for each to disappear. All three cups at once will pool in the mould and collapse the crumb. The cake should be heavy and moist but still hold a cut edge.
- Yield and serviceThe batter makes two generous moulded cakes or one large ring, serving 10 to 12. Serve warm, with hot sweetened cream or a thin pouring custard (creme anglaise) in the saucer, not spooned over the top.
The savarin is a ring of yeast-risen dough soaked in syrup and spirit, named for the gastronomic writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and generally traced to Parisian pastry cooks of the 1830s and 1840s, the Julien brothers being the names most often attached to it. What Jessup Whitehead gives here is not that: it is a biscuit de Savoie, the light whole-egg Savoy sponge whose invention is traditionally credited to the fourteenth-century court of the Counts of Savoy, treated in the savarin manner by piercing and flooding it with liqueur syrup. Whitehead was writing for men working hotel and restaurant ranges where the pastry shared oven space with the roasts and the parsnips, and where a yeast-raised savarin needing a proving cupboard and a graduated fire was simply not going to happen. His own closing note concedes as much: this pudding must take its chance in a crowded range, and he recommends the annexed easier method instead.