Good King Stanislas and the Forty Thieves: Difference between revisions

| 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 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 using a brioche steeped in alcohol; he made it the speciality of his house in the Rue Montorgueil in Paris and called it ‘baba’.

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 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?

  }}</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 for a yeast cake, which he would later make in the shape of their turbans.<ref>{{Cyt  

[[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 recipes] published in the 1930s by a Dr. Oetker factory in Oliva, Free City of Danzig (now part of Gdańsk, Poland)]]

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 recipes. 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:

History also came full circle when recipes 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: