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Babas Aux Fruits
Prepare the paste and bake six babas.
Place in a saucepan three-quarters pint water with four ounces sugar and two tablespoons kirsch, let come to a boil, then drop the babas in the syrup and infuse for three minutes, but only three at a time. Lift up with a skimmer, stand on a dish, pour the fruit sauce over them and serve
The book assumes you already have its baba paste — a rich, soft yeast batter with eggs and butter, baked in individual dariole moulds — and that you know what "fruit sauce" means. Both are worth pinning down before you start.
- The syrup quantity"Three-quarters pint" is ambiguous in a book of this vintage: an Imperial pint gives about 1¾ cups of water, a US pint 1½ cups. Either works with 4 oz sugar (a generous half cup); the Imperial reading gives a thinner syrup.
- Add the kirsch off the heatBoiling the spirit with the syrup drives off most of what you are paying for. Bring the water and sugar to a boil, pull the pan off, then stir in the kirsch.
- Stale babas absorb betterBabas baked the day before, dry to the touch, take up syrup without collapsing. Fresh warm ones turn to paste in the pan. The original's "only three at a time" is unexplained; it may simply be a matter of pan room and keeping the syrup hot.
- Three minutes is rightUnusually for a book of this period, the timing needs no adjustment. Three minutes in hot syrup saturates a small baba; longer and the crumb gives way. Turn each one once so both ends drink evenly.
- Baking the babasIf your paste recipe gives no temperature, bake buttered dariole or muffin moulds filled two-thirds full at 400F for 15–20 minutes, until well risen and deep brown.
- The fruit sauceMost likely a sieved, lightly sweetened fruit purée or a compote syrup; apricot, raspberry and cherry are all plausible for the period. Apricot jam thinned with water and strained is the most reliable substitute, and its acidity cuts the sugar of the soak.
- YieldSix babas. The recipe gives no serving temperature, no portion count and no make-ahead instruction; it reads as sauce-and-serve at once.
The baba is the older and plainer relative of the savarin: a yeast-raised, egg-rich cake soaked in sweetened spirit. Its name is usually traced to the Slavic word for an old woman or grandmother, also behind the Polish babka, though the derivation competes with a tradition linking the cake to Ali Baba; and the cake's arrival in France is traditionally credited to the exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński and his court at Lunéville in the eighteenth century, though that is not documented. What is better attested is that Parisian pâtissiers of the nineteenth century made the soaked baba a fixture of the restaurant dessert course, usually with rum; the kirsch here is a cherry brandy from Alsace and the Rhine. That the recipe begins "prepare the paste" and gives no further detail says a good deal about who these early twentieth-century international cook books were written for: cooks who already had a baba dough in their repertoire and needed only the finishing method.