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Babas Au Madere
Prepare babas the same as No. 687, but substitute same quantity of Madeira wine for the rum.
This is a one-line variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the baba formula from the preceding entry. What it actually specifies is the soaking liquor, and that is where the attention belongs.
- The recipe is incomplete on its ownEverything except the flavouring comes from No. 687: the dough, its rising, the moulds and the syrup. Without that entry you have no quantities at all, and nothing here can be reconstructed by guesswork.
- Madeira for rum, not in the doughMadeira for rum -- In the usual baba method the spirit goes into the syrup that the cooled cakes are soaked in rather than into the batter, where alcohol would slow the yeast; whether No. 687 does this can only be checked there. Substituting Madeira means a sweeter, nuttier, less fiery soak; a drier style such as Sercial or a medium-dry Verdelho keeps it from cloying against an already sugared syrup.
- Soak warm cake in warm syrupBabas take up liquid best when both cake and syrup are warm but not hot, and when the cakes are a day old and slightly dry. A fresh, steaming baba dropped into cold syrup collapses into paste.
- The mouldsA period baba mould is a small, deep, straight-sided tin — a dariole. Individual popover tins or 6 oz ovenproof cups give roughly the same proportion; a ring mould turns the same batter into a savarin.
- OvenThis entry gives no oven direction; the baking instruction is in No. 687 and should be taken from there. Babas are baked hot, so the risen dough sets before it slumps.
- Alcohol does not cook offAlcohol is not cooked off -- The syrup goes on after baking, so alcohol remains in the finished cake, diluted by the syrup but not driven off. Bear that in mind before serving these to children.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve at room temperature, glazed with warmed apricot jam if you want the traditional shine, and offer whipped cream separately. Yield depends entirely on the quantities in No. 687.
The baba belongs to the family of yeast-raised, syrup-soaked cakes that spread from Central Europe into French pâtisserie in the eighteenth century; the story usually told traces it to a Polish court cake steeped in wine or spirit, though the details are traditional rather than documented. What is clear from a book like this is the assumption that a professional kitchen would keep one dough and ring changes on it — rum today, Madeira tomorrow — so the printed "recipe" is a single line of substitution rather than a fresh set of quantities. Madeira in particular was a staple of the well-stocked pantry of the period, said to have been valued because it kept well once opened, which made it a natural partner to rum in the syrup pot.