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Baba with Madeira
Prepare a baba cake as described in the foregoing, but do not glaze it. Slit the cake into halves and remove the top piece. Pour a little cold water into a clean pan, adding a little sugar and lemon, and place it on the stove, boiling well for three minutes; then remove and at once add a gill or so of good sherry wine and half that quantity of curacoa. Lay the top part of the cake in a flat-bottomed vessel--a wire basket is recommended, to avoid breaking it, as it can be carefully lowered into the pan. Pour the prepared sauce gradually over it, and let it stand for a couple of minutes, then replace carefully on top of the other half of the cake. Arrange tastefully on a dessert-dish, garnish with candied cherries, the border being decorated with candied pineapple.
This is a finishing procedure rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have an unglazed baba from the preceding page. The whole point is controlled soaking, so the syrup and the timing are where the attention belongs.
- The hinge: soak the top onlyOnly the upper half goes into the syrup, and only for about two minutes. The dry bottom half carries the structure; if you drench the whole cake it collapses into pudding when you cut it.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fl oz. "A gill or so" of sherry with half that quantity of curaçao means roughly 1/2 cup sherry to 1/4 cup curaçao.
- The syrup base is vague"A little cold water... a little sugar and lemon" is left to judgment. A workable reading is about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar and a strip of lemon peel with a squeeze of juice, boiled three minutes to dissolve and thicken slightly.
- Add the wine off the heatThe instruction to remove the pan and "at once" add the sherry and curaçao is deliberate. Off-heat means the alcohol and the aromatics survive; boiling it in leaves a flat, syrupy taste.
- Madeira in the title, sherry in the methodOscar's book is inconsistent here, as period restaurant books often are. Either fortified wine works; Madeira gives a darker, more caramelised note, sherry a drier one.
- The wire basketA soaked baba is fragile. A flat sieve, a small cooling rack or a wide skimmer lets you lower and lift the cake without lifting it by hand, which is what actually breaks it.
- CuraçaoThe orange liqueur, not the blue-dyed bar version unless you want a blue-tinged syrup. Any decent triple sec or orange liqueur stands in.
- ServingAssemble shortly before serving; it will not hold overnight without the soaked half wetting through the dry one.
The baba is a yeast-risen, egg-rich cake soaked after baking, and its ancestry is generally traced to Central European yeast cakes brought into French pastry in the eighteenth century, with the rum-soaked baba au rhum and its ring-shaped cousin the savarin becoming fixtures of the nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire. Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, and the book works in that French idiom, giving one base preparation and then separate finishes -- here an unglazed baba soaked in a sherry syrup. The candied cherries and candied pineapple border are characteristic turn-of-the-century American hotel styling, when preserved fruit was both decoration and a quiet display of a well-stocked larder.