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Savarins, Framboises
Plunge the savarins into the above syrup for five minutes. Lift them up with a skimmer, arrange on a cold dish, then pour the remaining juice over the cakes and serve.
This is the finishing step of a longer entry: the savarins and the raspberry syrup are made earlier on the page, and what survives here is the soak and the plating. A few notes on what the instruction assumes.
- What a savarin isA rich yeast-risen batter cake baked in a plain ring mould, closely related to the baba but without the raisins. It is deliberately dry and open-crumbed so it can drink up syrup; a sponge or pound cake in its place is likely to break up under the soak.
- FramboisesFrench for raspberries. The syrup referred to is a raspberry syrup, generally a sugar syrup cooked with fresh raspberries or raspberry juice and often sharpened with lemon and laced with kirsch or rum.
- The syrup must be hot, the cake coolThe syrup, the cake cool -- The recipe does not say, but syrup for soaking is normally used warm rather than cold, and the cakes cooled, so the liquid is taken up through the crumb rather than sitting on the surface.
- Five minutes is the outside limitFive minutes -- The recipe fixes the soak at five minutes. Turning the cakes once during the soak helps both faces take up liquid; a savarin left much longer, or soaked in syrup near boiling, softens to the point where it will not lift off the skimmer intact.
- SkimmerA flat perforated spoon. A wide slotted spatula or a spider does the same job and gives better support under a soaked cake.
- "Cold dish"The instruction indicates the savarins are dished and served cold rather than hot; a cool platter suits that. Whether the dish itself was meant to be chilled is not specified.
- AlcoholIf the syrup contains kirsch or rum, it should be stirred in off the heat at the end. Boiling it drives off most of the aroma the spirit was added for.
- ServingSavarins may be baked in small individual ring moulds or as a single large ring to be cut at table. This recipe calls only for the remaining juice to be poured over; cream and fresh fruit in the hollow centre are a common later treatment, not part of the instruction.
The savarin belongs to the same family as the rum baba, a yeast cake soaked in sweetened spirit that reached France through the Polish and Alsatian pastry trade in the early nineteenth century. The ring form and the name are traditionally credited to the Parisian pâtissiers the Julien brothers, who are said to have named it for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du goût (1825); the attribution is repeated everywhere but rests on trade lore rather than documentation. By the time an American compendium like this one was assembling "the world's kitchen" for domestic readers, the savarin had become a fixed item of the international restaurant repertoire, varied chiefly by what went into the syrup — rum, kirsch, apricot, or as here, raspberries.