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Baba with Vanilla Cream Sauce
Prepare a baba cake as previously described, and when removed from the mould and laid on a dish, cut it into six equal parts. Take a small quantity of apricot marmalade, taking one piece of the cake in the hand and cover the sides where cut with the marmalade, spreading it smoothly with a knife. Then arrange the six pieces together on a dish, giving them the same form as before. Serve with vanilla cream sauce.
This is a finishing and plating instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a baked baba on hand and a cook who can make a custard sauce. Two things carry it — the marmalade must be loose enough to spread without tearing the crumb, and the sauce must be a true stirred custard.
- "As previously described"The baba is a yeast-raised cake, richer than bread and lighter than pound cake, baked in a deep mould; babas of this period were commonly soaked in a rum or kirsch syrup after unmoulding, though the earlier recipe referred to here is not reproduced on this page. If it is not soaked it will be dry, and the apricot layer alone will not rescue it.
- Apricot marmaladeIn this period the word means apricot jam or a thick apricot purée, not the shredded-peel citrus preserve. Warm it slightly and pass it through a sieve so it spreads in a thin even film; stiff cold jam will pull the cut faces apart.
- Cutting into sixThe recipe says only six equal parts; since they are reassembled into "the same form as before," wedges cut down through the cake are the likeliest reading. Use a long serrated knife with a sawing motion and let the cake cool fully first, or the soft crumb compresses under the blade.
- Vanilla cream sauceThis is crème anglaise: egg yolks, sugar, milk or cream and vanilla, stirred over gentle heat until it coats a spoon, around 170-180F. Do not let it approach a simmer or the yolks curdle; strain it as soon as it thickens.
- ReassemblingPress the wedges back together on the serving dish so the cake looks whole, with the apricot as invisible mortar. Do this shortly before serving; the exposed cut surfaces dry quickly, which may be part of the point of the marmalade.
- Serving the sauceThe text says only to serve it with vanilla cream sauce. Pouring it around the base rather than over the cake will help the reassembled shape hold; serve it warm or cold, but not hot enough to slacken the apricot.
- YieldSix portions, as the six cuts indicate.
Baba came into French pastry from Poland and eastern Europe, and is generally traced to the court of the exiled Polish king Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine in the eighteenth century; the story that he named it for Ali Baba is traditional rather than documented. By the time Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel in the 1890s, baba was standard grand-hotel repertoire — a yeasted cake soaked in spirit syrup, glazed with apricot, and sent out with a custard sauce. The brevity of this entry is characteristic of the book, which says nothing about how to raise a baba or stir an anglaise and confines itself to how the dish was to be presented in the dining room. Reassembling the cut wedges into an apparently whole cake, so that it could be served in neat portions without looking portioned, is exactly the kind of dining-room stagecraft Oscar's reputation was built on.