No. 3227

Baba Syruped or Iced

Baba au Sirop ou Glace

With some baba paste (No. 129) fill a well-buttered baba mold three-quarters full; stand this in a moderately heated place, cover and leave until the paste has reached to the upper edges of the mold, then set it on a pie plate in a slow oven to bake; this operation ought to take from an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half; as soon as baked cut away any surplus paste overreaching the top and invert the baba on a grate. Prepare a thirty-two degree hot syrup flavored with good rum; soak the baba with this, applying it with a brush, and let drain well. It can be served simply soaked with this syrup or else iced with a light layer of water icing (No. 102) or fondant (No. 58) well flavored with rum. After the icing has dried remove the baba carefully from the grate and lay it on a dish; should it be iced decorate the icing with angelica lozenges, halved cherries and cuts of orange peels, surrounding the base with a circle of marchpane in small cases; serve.

← No. 3226 Angel Cake Large Cakes for Entremets No. 3228 Biscuit a la Hernani →

For the Modern Kitchen

A yeast-raised baba baked in a tall mold, then saturated with rum syrup and finished either plain or under a poured icing. Two things in the original need translating: the syrup density and the oven.

The hinge: soak while warm, syrup hotRanhofer specifies a hot syrup, and the baba is best still warm when it meets it. He brushes it on and lets it drain; brushing in repeated coats soaks more evenly than a single dunk.
"Thirty-two degree" syrupThat is degrees Baume, read on a syrup hydrometer, not temperature. It is a heavy syrup of roughly 1.28 specific gravity - in practice about 3 parts sugar to 2 parts water by weight, boiled to dissolve. Rum goes in off the heat so it is not driven off.
Oven numbers"slow oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 300-325F, though the book gives no temperatures at all. The stated hour and a quarter to hour and a half assumes a full-size baba mold; a smaller modern tube or kugelhopf mold will be done sooner, and small individual babas sooner still, so test rather than trust the clock.
"A moderately heated place"The proofing spot, warm rather than hot, somewhere in the region of 80F. The dough is enriched with butter and eggs and rises slowly; fill the mold three-quarters full and let it come just to the rim, as the recipe directs, and no further.
The cross-referenced numbersNo. 129 is Ranhofer's baba paste, a rich yeast dough in the brioche family; babas of the period often carried currants or raisins, though that would need checking against No. 129 itself. No. 102 water icing is confectioners' sugar thinned with water or syrup; fondant such as No. 58 is generally warmed only to about body heat, around 100F, before pouring, or it dries dull.
Marchpane and angelicaMarchpane is marzipan; the "circle of marchpane in small cases" at the base is most likely little paper cases of it. Candied angelica is still sold by baking suppliers but is scarce; candied citron, green candied cherry or thin strips of candied lime peel stand in for the green lozenges.
DrainingThe grate over a pan is not optional. Syrup that pools underneath makes the base soggy and the icing will not set on a wet surface; let it drain until the drip stops before glazing.
YieldA single large baba from a standard tube mold will serve roughly eight to ten as a dessert course, cut in wedges. The section heading places it among the large cakes for entremets, so it is meant to come to table whole.

A Little History

Baba came into French pastry from Poland, and tradition traces it to the exiled king Stanislaw Leszczynski, who is often said to have had a dry Polish yeast cake moistened with sweet wine or rum at his court in Lorraine; the story is repeated in nineteenth-century pastry books more often than it is documented. What is better attested is that Parisian pastry cooks of the 1830s and 1840s took up the soaked yeast cake and produced a ring-molded, rum-syruped relative, the savarin; the two have been cousins in the steeped-cake repertoire ever since. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 with the classical French repertoire arranged by numbered cross-reference, which is why this entry is less a recipe than a set of assembly instructions pointing at a dough, an icing and a fondant elsewhere in the book. The elaborate finish - angelica lozenges, halved cherries, orange peel, a collar of marzipan in paper cases - is characteristic of the period, when a large cake for the entremets course was expected to be looked at before it was eaten.