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Baba with Raisins
Mix half an ounce of German yeast and four ounces of sifted flour with warm water to a soft dough, and put it near the fire to rise. Rub twelve ounces of butter into twelve ounces of flour, work it into a smooth paste with eight well-beaten eggs, one ounce of pounded sugar, and a little salt. When the paste is ready and the sponge sufficiently risen, blend them well together and mix in two ounces of finely-minced candied citron-peel, two ounces of well-dried currants, and three ounces of stoned raisins. Butter a mould, fill it about half full, and allow it to rise until it is nearly at the top, when it may be baked at once in a moderate oven. Time to bake, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. Sufficient for a three-pint mould.
A rich, yeast-raised fruit cake built by the sponge method — a small ferment first, then a butter-heavy dough folded into it. The weights are generous and the dough is slack; nothing here works if it is rushed.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed yeast. Half an ounce is about 14 g; roughly 1½ teaspoons of instant dried yeast will do the same work. It was sold fresh by weight, so a reader would have had to fetch it from a baker or grocer.
- Weights in metric4 oz flour for the sponge is 115 g; 12 oz butter and 12 oz flour are 340 g each. The 2 oz citron peel, 2 oz currants and 3 oz raisins come to 55 g, 55 g and 85 g.
- A moderate oven350F / 175C. At that heat a large, sugary, egg-rich cake will colour well before the centre is set, so cover loosely with foil once the top is deep brown.
- The hinge: the second riseHalf-filling the mould and letting it climb nearly to the top is the whole method. This dough is heavy with butter and eggs and will take an hour or more in a warm room; underproved it bakes dense and greasy, overproved it collapses as it hits the oven.
- Blending sponge and pasteBeat the two together thoroughly before the fruit goes in — eight eggs' worth of butter paste and a wet sponge will look curdled at first and come together with work. Add the fruit last and only enough to distribute it.
- The mouldThree pints is about 1.7 litres. A kugelhopf or savarin ring, or a deep 20 cm tin, suits it; butter heavily and flour, as the sugar and fruit stick.
- The time to bakeNinety minutes is right for the full three-pint mould but test rather than trust it: a skewer should come out clean and the centre should read 195-200F / 90-93C. Smaller moulds want 35-45 minutes.
- Yield and servingThis is a dry baba: there is no rum syrup in Cassell's version and the crumb is firmer than a soaked baba's. A three-pint mould should give something in the order of ten to twelve slices.
- Probable cost2s 4d, a substantial sum, which tells you this was a cake for a household with butter and eggs to spare.
The baba reaches English cookery books by way of France, and its origin is traditionally traced to Stanisław Leszczyński, the exiled Polish king who kept court at Lunéville in the eighteenth century; the story that he soaked a dry kugelhopf in sweet wine and named it after Ali Baba is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere. The name itself is generally taken from the Slavic baba, old woman or grandmother, also the root of the Polish babka — a related cake, likewise tall, yeast-raised, fruit-studded and baked in a fluted mould. What Cassell's prints here is the older, unsoaked form, closer to babka or kugelhopf than to the rum-drenched babas of Parisian pâtisserie, and it belongs to a Victorian family of enriched yeast doughs — Bath buns, Sally Lunn, the various "German" cakes — that sat between bread and confectionery at a time when yeast still had its place in the cake tin alongside the chemical raising agents already in wide use.