Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Sauce for Baba
Sauce for Baba
Let two cups of sugar and one cup of water boil in the blazer about six minutes, then add one-fourth a cup, or more, of maraschino, rum or sherry wine.
Lay the baba, sliced or in individual forms, into the hot syrup and let stand a few minutes, basting the cake with the syrup. When hot, serve with or without whipped cream. Half a cup of apricot or quince marmalade may be added with the wine.
A chafing-dish sauce for soaking a baba at the table. The whole point is that the cake absorbs hot syrup while the spirit stays bright, so the order of operations matters more than the timing.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the water pan below it is the hot-water bath. Any wide, shallow saucepan or a skillet works, since you want enough surface to lay slices flat in the syrup.
- Syrup proportionsTwo cups sugar to one cup water is a heavy syrup. A few minutes' boiling thickens it enough to cling; the exact point depends on the pan and the flame, and longer boiling will make it progressively stickier as it cools.
- Add the spirit off the heatTake the pan off the flame before the maraschino, rum or sherry goes in. Boiling it drives off both the alcohol and the aromatics that the sauce exists to deliver, and a splash of spirit into a violently boiling syrup near an open chafing-dish flame can flare.
- MaraschinoThis means maraschino liqueur, distilled from Marasca cherries -- dry, faintly bitter, nothing like the syrup in a jar of modern cocktail cherries. Luxardo or a similar Italian bottling is the intended flavour.
- BabaA yeast-risen, egg-rich cake baked in small dariole moulds or a ring, dry and open-crumbed by design so it drinks syrup. Bakery rum babas or a savarin ring both work; a day-old cake absorbs better than a fresh one.
- Soaking time"A few minutes" means until the slices are hot through and heavy with syrup, usually 3-5 minutes with basting, turning once. A soft sponge is likely to go to pieces; a proper yeast baba holds its shape.
- The marmalade variationApricot or quince marmalade should be warmed and, if coarse, sieved before it goes in with the wine, or it will sit in lumps rather than loosening the syrup into a glaze.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantity of syrup is generous and will serve a sliced ring or several individual babas. The recipe leaves whipped cream optional.
The baba came to French pastry from Poland, and the story generally told traces it to the exiled king Stanis"aw Leszczy"ski, whose court is said to have moistened a dry babka with sweet wine; the Paris pastry house Stohrer, founded by a baker from that household in 1730, is traditionally credited with fixing the rum-soaked version. By the mid-nineteenth century Parisian bakers had also produced the savarin, the same dough baked as a ring and steeped in syrup. This recipe belongs to a different fashion entirely: the American chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s, when hostesses cooked small hot dishes in front of guests at supper parties, and a bought baba finished in flaming-adjacent syrup at the table counted as an accomplishment. Janet McKenzie Hill, editor of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, wrote squarely for that audience.