Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Savarin Cake
Savarin Cake
By many cooks this cake is confounded with the Baba Cake; but there is no good reason for associating the two together. Rub three-quarters of a pound of butter into a pound and a quarter of flour, then mix in five tablespoonfuls of sugar, four well-beaten eggs and sufficient warm milk to make a dough. Knead it well, then mix in a quarter of a pound of leaven. Blanch and chop very fine two ounces of sweet almonds; butter the interior of a cake-mould and spread the chopped almonds over it, put in the cake mixture and place it in a warm place to rise. When well risen set the cake in the oven and bake it. Put half a pint of water in a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of sugar and boil until it is reduced to two-thirds its original quantity, then pour in two wineglassfuls of rum, boil it up and remove from the fire. When cooked turn the cake out of the mould onto a dish and pour the sauce over it. It may then be served either hot or cold.
A rich yeast-raised cake soaked in rum syrup. The original assumes you keep a piece of fermenting bread dough on hand and know your own oven, so those are the two gaps to fill.
- The hinge: soak while warmPour the syrup over the cake while both are still warm, or the crumb will not drink it in. A cold savarin sheds syrup onto the dish instead of absorbing it; add the syrup in stages and let each pour soak through.
- "A quarter of a pound of leaven"Leaven here is a lump of already-fermenting bread dough, kept back from a previous baking. In place of 4 oz of it, use about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast dissolved in the warm milk, and hold back roughly 2 oz of flour; the milk is unmeasured in any case ("sufficient warm milk"), so simply add a little less of it.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because none could be. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 350-400F, suits this dough; allow roughly 25 to 35 minutes for a full-size ring, until deep gold and hollow-sounding. The sugar and butter mean it colours before the centre is set, so test with a skewer.
- The mouldThe classic savarin is a plain ring mould, so the syrup reaches the crumb from both sides and the well can hold fruit or cream; this recipe says only "a cake-mould." Butter it generously, since the chopped almonds pressed onto the butter form the crust and will stick if the film is thin.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in this period runs about 2 fluid ounces, so two glassfuls is roughly 1/2 cup of rum. Add it off the boil, bring back just to a boil as directed, and no longer, or the alcohol you paid for goes up the chimney.
- The syrupHalf a pint of water is 1 cup; reduced to two-thirds it leaves about 2/3 cup before the rum goes in. Combined, that is a little over a cup of syrup for the cake, which is on the modest side for a large ring - a second batch is not unreasonable.
- Rising a rich doughThree-quarters of a pound of butter to a pound and a quarter of flour makes a heavy, slow dough. "A warm place" means comfortably warm rather than hot, and this dough will likely take considerably longer to rise than a lean one -- judge it by volume, not the clock.
- YieldEnough batter for a large ring mould, perhaps 8 to 10 servings; the recipe specifies neither. Served cold it wants whipped cream or macerated fruit in the centre; hot it needs nothing but the syrup.
The savarin is generally traced to nineteenth-century Parisian pâtissiers, who named it for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du Gout; the Julien brothers are the pastry cooks usually credited with the ring-moulded, rum-soaked version. Oscar's insistence that it not be confounded with the baba is a professional's point rather than a pedant's: the baba, whose origins are traditionally placed in Poland and whose arrival in France is attached to the exiled king Stanislaw Leszczynski, is baked tall in a cylindrical mould and usually studded with raisins, while the savarin is a plain ring whose hollow centre exists to be filled. Both belong to the family of yeast-raised cakes soaked with syrup after baking. That the distinction mattered enough to open the recipe says something about the Waldorf kitchen of the 1890s.