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Savarin
(Paris.) The Savarin and Baba are so much alike that the same recipe will do for both. They are familiar to all tourists, and very rich and light. Mix 1 pound sifted flour, 4 ounces sugar, 1/2 pound butter, 8 eggs, and 1 ounce Vienna yeast. Melt the yeast in 1/2 pint warm milk, and set to rise. It is best to add only a little flour, then, when risen, the rest. When light, add the eggs and sugar and butter melted, and stir till smooth with the rest of the flour. Line a mould with butter and chopped almonds, and pour in the dough, 3/4 full. When risen to the edge, bake in a moderate oven 1 1/2 hours. Before turning out, gash the top with a knife, pour over it a syrup of sugar and water boiled, and some rum, serve on a plate decked with raisins or candied fruit.
A classic yeast-risen savarin dough, written for a cook who already knew what a savarin mould looked like. Two things in the original need correcting outright: the baking time and the order in which the butter goes in.
- The hinge: bake timeAn hour and a half will ruin this. A ring mould of savarin dough bakes in about 30 to 40 minutes at 350F; a deeper baba mould or individual moulds, 20 to 30 minutes. It is done when deep gold, springy, and pulling from the sides.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Nothing hotter, or the outside sets before the open crumb has finished rising.
- Vienna yeastCompressed fresh baker's yeast. One ounce is about 28 g fresh, roughly 14 g active dry or 9 g instant. Vienna yeast was simply the pressed cake yeast then reckoned the best quality, sold under that name.
- Melted butterHalf a pound is 225 g. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before it meets the dough, or it will kill the yeast and slacken the gluten. Many cooks now beat softened butter into the risen dough in pieces instead, which gives a better crumb.
- The sponge"Add only a little flour, then, when risen, the rest" is a sponge-and-dough method. Whisk the yeast, the half pint (1 cup) of warm milk and perhaps a quarter of the flour, let it bubble and dome for 30 to 45 minutes, then work in eggs, sugar, remaining flour and lastly the butter. The finished dough is closer to a thick batter than a kneadable bread dough; beat it hard until it is glossy and pulls away in strands.
- Eight eggsEggs called for in period recipes are often reckoned a little smaller than modern large ones, so seven large modern eggs may be nearer the mark for a pound (about 450 g, or 3 1/2 cups) of flour.
- The mouldA savarin mould is a shallow ring; a baba mould is a tall cylinder, plain or fluted. Butter it heavily and press chopped almonds against the sides. Three-quarters full is right, and it should be left to rise only to the rim, not over it.
- Syrup and rumEqual weights sugar and water, boiled to dissolve, then rum stirred in off the heat so it is not driven off. Gash the hot cake and spoon the hot syrup on in stages, letting each soaking disappear; a savarin should be saturated but not collapsing.
- YieldA pound of flour gives one large ring serving 10 to 12, or about a dozen individual babas.
Savarin and baba really are the same dough, and the recipe is right to treat them together; the difference is the mould and the century. The baba is traditionally said to have come to France with the Polish court of Stanisław Leszczyński in the eighteenth century, and his pastry cook is credited with founding the Stohrer shop in Paris in 1730; the rum-soaked baba au rhum itself, however, is generally dated to the nineteenth century, earlier versions having been moistened with sweet wine. The ring-shaped savarin is generally traced to the Parisian pâtissiers known as the Julien brothers in the 1840s, who named it for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du goût. This book collects dishes its author ate abroad and brought home, which is why the headnote says only "(Paris.)" and "familiar to all tourists" — an American reader would have recognised it from a holiday rather than from a shop at home.