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Baba with Syrup
Sift 3 cups flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt into a basin, add 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/2 cup luke warm milk; make well in center of flour, pour in 5 beaten eggs, mix with the hand for 5 minutes. Put it into Criscoed basin, spread over with 1/2 cup Crisco, cover and put in warm place until it has risen to twice its original size. Knead until elastic, add 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 tablespoons currants, 2 tablespoons sultana raisins, knead again. Turn into large Criscoed mold. It should not be more than half full. Allow to rise to top of tin, then bake in moderate oven for 30 minutes. Turn out and pour syrup over it. To make syrup, boil two cups of water with 1/4 cup sugar for 10 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons apricot jam and boil 5 minutes. Strain, add 1 wineglass rum and bring to boiling point.
A yeast-raised baba enriched with five eggs, soaked in rum syrup. The dough is closer to a batter than a bread dough, and the syrup should meet the cake while both are warm.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is roughly equivalent to one packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons. Dissolve it in the warm milk as written; milk at blood heat, not hot.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350 to 375F. Thirty minutes suits a ring or tube mold; a deeper single mold may want 40 minutes. The baba is done when a skewer comes out clean and the crust sounds hollow.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell hydrogenated shortening, so Crisco stands in everywhere butter would have been used. Butter gives a better baba; use the same half cup, softened, worked into the risen dough rather than merely spread over it.
- "Mix with the hand for 5 minutes"This is the hinge. The dough is slack and sticky and cannot be kneaded on a board in the ordinary way; you beat and slap it in the bowl until it pulls away in strings. A stand mixer with the dough hook does the same work in five to eight minutes.
- Second "kneading"After the first rise, work in the sugar and dried fruit by folding and slapping the dough in the bowl. Adding sugar late keeps the first rise brisk.
- Half-full moldTaken literally. An enriched dough this wet will climb and spill; use a tube or ring mold roomy enough that the dough comes no more than halfway up.
- Wineglass of rumIn cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. It goes into the syrup off the boil and is then brought back to boiling point, so much of the alcohol cooks off; add it after straining if you want more of the flavor to survive.
- SyrupingPour the syrup over the baba while the cake is warm and the syrup hot, in stages, letting each addition soak in. A cold cake sheds syrup and goes soggy only on the outside.
- YieldServes eight to ten. Best the day it is made; the syrup keeps it moist for a second day if covered.
The baba is generally traced to Poland and to the courts of Lorraine, where a dry yeast cake was revived with sweet wine or rum; the story that it was named for Ali Baba by the exiled Stanislas Leszczyński is traditional rather than documented, and the older, plainer sense of baba as an old woman or a tall fluted loaf is probably closer to the truth. By the time it reached American cookbooks it had settled into this form: an egg-rich yeast dough with currants and sultanas, baked in a ring and drowned in rum syrup thickened faintly with apricot jam. Its appearance here reflects the book's purpose as much as the dish's pedigree — A Calendar of Dinners was a promotional cookbook, and its recipes find a place for Crisco, even one whose European original would have been built on butter.