Home › The World's Kitchen › Babas Au Kirsch
Babas Au Kirsch
Prepare six plain babas. Place three-quarters of a pint water in a small saucepan with two ounces sugar and boil for five minutes. Remove and lay the pan on a table; pour in two tablespoons of kirsch. Dip the babas in the sauce for three minutes. Dress on a dish, pour a tablespoon pure kirsch over, pour a gill of the sauce around them and serve.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a cake recipe: it assumes you already have six plain babas, and tells you only how to soak and dress them. A few of the measurements need translating, and the syrup as written is far thinner than a modern baker would expect.
- The babas themselves"Plain babas" means small yeast-raised cakes baked in individual dariole moulds, unsweetened or barely sweetened; they are often left a day so they drink syrup without collapsing. Any enriched yeast dough baked in small individual moulds will do; freshly baked, very soft babas will fall apart in the pan.
- Three-quarters of a pintIn an American book of this period that is 12 fl oz, or 1 1/2 cups. If you are working from British measures it is 15 fl oz. Either way it is enough to soak six small cakes in a narrow saucepan.
- A gillIn American measure 4 fl oz, half a cup; in British measure 5 fl oz. That is the syrup poured around the babas on the serving dish, not over them.
- The syrup is deliberately lightTwo ounces of sugar (about 1/4 cup) to 12 fl oz water gives a thin syrup that soaks in quickly. Modern baba syrups run much heavier, often equal weights of sugar and water; if you use one of those, cut the soaking time or the cakes will stay dense in the middle.
- Add the kirsch off the heatThis is the hinge. The pan comes off the stove and onto the table before the spirit goes in, so the alcohol and the cherry-kernel aroma are not boiled away. Kirsch is a clear, dry cherry eau-de-vie of around 40 percent alcohol, not a sweet cherry liqueur.
- Soaking timeThree minutes in hot syrup is right for small babas, turning them once. Judge by weight and feel rather than the clock: a soaked baba should be heavy, glossy and yielding but still hold its shape when lifted with a slotted spoon.
- ServingSix babas serve six as a dessert course. The recipe does not say whether they go to table warm or cool; the final spoonful of pure, unboiled kirsch over each one is what carries the scent to the table.
The baba came to French pastry from Poland, and its name is often said to come from the Polish and Slavic word for a grandmother or old woman, used for a tall fermented cake. The story generally traced through nineteenth-century pastry writing credits the exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński, who held the duchy of Lorraine in the mid-1700s, with having a dry babka moistened with sweet wine or spirit; the Paris pastry house Stohrer, founded by a baker said to have come from his court, is traditionally given the syrup-soaked version. By 1900 the small individual baba steeped in rum was standard restaurant work, and a kirsch version like this one belongs to the same family, leaning on Alsatian and Swiss cherry brandy instead of Caribbean rum. Its appearance among a survey of foreign dishes is typical of the period: American hotel and household cookery was absorbing the French professional repertoire wholesale, often as brief finishing notes like this that presume a cook who already knows how to make the cake.