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Savarins, Chantilly
Prepare six savarins. Remove the raspberries altogether. When you remove the savarins from the oven, let them cool off on a table; unmould them. Have in a small saucepan three ounces granulated sugar, half pint cold water and three tablespoons of Madeira wine. Boil for five minutes, stirring well meanwhile. Remove to a table, plunge the savarins into the sauce for five minutes. Lift them up, arrange on a dish. Pour half a teaspoon of Madeira wine over each; fill up the centre of each cake with half pint whipped cream, and serve.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a complete one: it assumes you have already made savarins from an earlier page in the book, and its whole business is the soaking syrup and the cream. A few of its instructions only make sense once you know what has been left out.
- "Remove the raspberries altogether"This appears to point back to a preceding savarin recipe in the book that used raspberries; read it as "make the savarins as before, but omit the fruit." There are no raspberries anywhere in this version.
- The syrupThree ounces of granulated sugar is roughly a scant half cup, and half a pint of water is one cup. That is a light syrup, thin enough to soak in rather than glaze; five minutes of boiling will not thicken it much.
- Soak the cakes warm, in warm syrupSoaking -- The recipe says to let the savarins cool before unmoulding, and to take the syrup off the heat before the cakes go in. Turning the cakes once during the five minutes helps both sides drink evenly.
- Madeira in two placesThree tablespoons go into the syrup, where some of the alcohol boils off, and a further half teaspoon is spooned over each cake at the end for aroma; the second addition is the only uncooked wine in the dish. The recipe does not specify a style of Madeira.
- The cream measurement"Half pint whipped cream" for each of six cakes would be a cup apiece, which is more than the ring of a savarin will hold. Read it as half a pint of cream for the batch -- one cup unwhipped, roughly two cups whipped, divided among the six. Whip to soft peaks; a stiff cream sits on top instead of settling into the centre.
- Chantilly means sweetened whipped creamIn this period the term implies cream whipped with a little sugar and usually vanilla. Around a tablespoon of sugar per cup of cream is right here, since the cakes themselves are already syrup-soaked.
- Baking, if you need itThe recipe gives no oven detail because it belongs to the earlier one, and nothing here specifies a temperature. Savarins are a yeast batter baked in well-buttered ring moulds in a moderately hot oven; modern guidance for individual sizes runs in the region of 375-400F for something like 15-25 minutes, but that is not from the book. The batter is slack and clings.
- Yield and timingSix individual cakes, one per person. The soaked savarins are best assembled shortly before serving -- filled with cream, they hold perhaps half an hour before the cream begins to slump into the crumb.
The savarin is a ring-baked version of the baba, a yeast-leavened cake soaked in syrup or spirit, and is generally traced to the Paris pastry firm of the Julien brothers in the mid-nineteenth century, who are said to have named it in honour of the gastronomic writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. The defining trick is the ring shape: baked in a mould with a hollow centre, the cake gives you a well to fill, which is why savarins are almost always finished with cream, fruit or a compote rather than served plain. "Chantilly" for sweetened whipped cream is traditionally attached to the Château de Chantilly and its kitchens, an association often repeated but not firmly documented; by 1900 it was simply the standard professional term. The recipe's habit of pointing back to a previous version -- make it as before, but leave out the raspberries -- is typical of the large hotel-kitchen cookbooks of the era, which catalogued dozens of small variations on one base preparation as separate menu items.}