savarin a dessert, is essentially an enriched yeast dough baked in a ring mould. A syrup laced with kirsch or rum is used to soak it when cool; and the central hole may be filled with fruit or cream. There is also a solid, holeless form, mazarin, which is split and filled with cream.
The savarin derived from the E. European baba, as naturalized in Alsace in the 18th century. What happened was that in the mid- or late 1840s one of the brothers Julien, Parisian pâtissiers, experimented with the baba in a slightly different form. He used the same dough, but removed the dried fruits and soaked the savarin with his own ‘secret’ syrup. He named his new confection in honour of the famous gastronomic writer brillat-Savarin, although this name for it does not seem to have been recorded until the 1860s.
