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{{ Cytat
| Baba, a cake made from leavened dough that contains raisins and is steeped, after baking, in rum or kirsch [Alsatian cherry liqueur] syrup. {{...}} The origin of this cake is attributed to the greediness of the Polish king Stanislas Leszcsynski [sic], who was exiled in Lorraine. He found the traditional kouglof [Alsatian bundt cake] too dry and improved it by adding rum. As a dedicated reader of the Thousand and One Nights, he is said to have named this creation after his favourite hero, Ali Baba. This recipe recipë was a great success at the court of Nancy [capital of Lorraine], where it was usually served with a sauce of sweet Málaga wine. {{...}} Sthorer [sic], a pastrycook who attended the court of the Polish king, perfected the recipe recipë using a brioche steeped in alcohol; he made it the speciality of his house in the Rue Montorgueil in Paris and called it ‘baba’.
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| inni = ed. Joël Robuchon
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As we shall see, ''Larousse Gastronomique'' isn't much more reliable than ''Astérix'' as a source of historical knowledge. After all, why would Stanislas take an Alsatian ''kouglof'' and steep it in Alsatian ''kirsch'' while staying in Lorraine? Was this recipe recipë really developed by the king himself or rather by one of his pastrycooks, such as the aforementioned Stohrer? And most importantly, why would a Pole name a cake after some Arab guy, if the word ''"baba"'' had already meant "bundt cake" in his own native language for centuries?
It looks like we need to take a closer look at this King Stanislas and his relation to the ''baba''. You could shoot a few action movies based on his biography, but I will do my best to recap his life and his times as succinctly as possible.
| strony = 173
| url = https://books.google.dk/books?id=Dt0RErSFvE8C&lpg=PA171&pg=PA17
}}</ref> A more interesting legend claims that it was the Three Kings (or Magi) themselves who stopped on their way from the Holy Land to Cologne (where their alleged relics are still held) in the picturesque Alsatian town of Ribeauvillé. There, they stayed in the house of a local baker named Kugel and showed their gratitude by giving him a recipe recipë for a yeast cake, which he would later make in the shape of their turbans.<ref>{{Cyt
| nazwisko = Perrier-Robert
| imię = Annie
In 1730, Stohrer decided to start his own business, so he opened – next to the northern coach terminus in Paris, at Mont Orgueilleux (now 51, Montorgueil Street) – [https://stohrer.fr/en the oldest Parisian pastry shop still in operation.] Did he sell ''babas / kouglofs'' there? Most probably. Were they imbibed with rum? Probably not, at least not from the start. 18th-century sources are quite unanimous in describing the ''baba'' as coloured with saffron and studded with raisins, without any mention of rum. At the beginning of the 19th century, the great gourmet Grimod de La Reynière would already attribute the baba to Stanislas, but it still wasn't the rum baba.
[[File:Baba zwyczajna.jpg|thumb|upright|A regular Polish ''baba''<br />From [https://polona.pl/item/dra-oetkera-przepisy-dla-skrzetnych-gospodyn,MTY0MjkxNDA/20/#item a collection of pastry recipesrecipës] published in the 1930s by a Dr. Oetker factory in Oliva, Free City of Danzig (now part of Gdańsk, Poland)]]
{{ Cytat
| The baba is a Polish dish invented by Stanislas Leczinski [sic], King of Poland and Grand [sic] Duke of Lorraine and Bar, a great gourmet towards the end of his days, who was no stranger at all to culinary practice. Saffron and Corinthian raisins are the principal seasonings of the baba, but few cooks know how to make it well.
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In pre-revolutionary France, rum was rare anyway, mostly due to high custom duties, imposed to protect the producers of domestic brandies and other alcohols. It was only at the beginning of the 19th century that the French learned to appreciate the English punch, which was made from Caribbean sugar-cane rum. In the 1840s, rum started to appear in French dessert recipesrecipës. And so the tasty legend of a Polish king who soaked a dry ''kouglof'' in rum and named it after a fairy-tale protagonist, falls apart like a house of cards. Mr. Michael Krondl, a food historian, has put it best:
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== Recipe ==
History also came full circle when recipes recipës for Polish ''baby'' came back to Poland, but "improved" by the addition of alcohol-laced syrup. Here's one, with arak-based punch, rather than rum, added to the dough before baking:
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