Babà made by Scaturchio, historic and renowned pastry shop in Naples
Neapolitan babà or, better said, “babbà” (with a double b and the stress on the final a) is a dessert known worldwide and another icon of the Italian pasticceria. Of course, it is also a cultural symbol of the city of Naples, in Southern Italy, once the capital of the largest Italian kingdom, which included today’s regions of Campania, Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata, Molise, part of Abruzzo and Sicily.
Babà alla Napoletana is a small cake, in the shape of a mushroom or a chef’s hat, soaked in rum, for this reason it’s also called Babà al Rum, and is sometimes filled with whipped cream or confectionery custard. Babà was known in the rest of Italy well before the Unification of the country (1861).
Babà alla crema, with confectioner's custard
In fact, it appears amongst the 1836 recipes for the Duchesse of Parma, Maria Luigia, compiled by her Chef Angeletti. Undoubtedly, though, babà’s fame has spread all around the world as a by-product of both the Neapolitan culture and language, thanks also to the many emigrants from Naples and its kingdom. “You’re a babà”, still today in Naples, is said to a person with a sweet personality, with a generous nature or one extremely skilled in performing thorny tasks.
Naples in the 18th century
Through the centuries, Neapolitans have developed a singular way of eating babà as well: “Standing up, and in a flash, holding the cap to eat the stalk: one, two, three bites and voilà: no one on earth can snatch it from our fingers”, the description comes from Luciano Pignataro, a prominent Italian food and wine commentator, author of il Dolce di Napoli (The sweet of Naples). According to the same author, “Babà can well claim to be an urban pastry since, to make it, a consolidated wisdom is required – commercial bakeries and pastry shops, therefore, not the hearth and home”. True, the making of babà, however, has been common also in Neapolitan and Italian households, perhaps made in the easier shape of a large cake made in the so-called babà mould.
Luigi Cremona
Regardless of all this, it would be a mistake to believe that babà was born in Naples or in Italy at all. It was, instead, an offshoot of what was going on in Europe in the 17th and 18th century. As Luigi Cremona, a respected Italian food writer, puts it: “Continental monarchies dominated the scene with a tangle of relations that had peculiar consequences for desserts. A brightening example of it was Neapolitan babà”, he wrote in 2004 in the introduction to L’Italia dei Dolci (Italy of the Sweets), a guide published by the prestigious Italian Touring Club.
King Ferdinand IV and Queen Marie Caroline
Indeed, babà arrived to Naples from France, as an indirect consequence of the rivalry between two powerful sisters: Marie Antoinette, who had married the king of France, Louis XVI, and her sister, Marie Caroline, who was the spouse of King Ferdinand IV of Naples. In the last decades of the 18th century, Marie Caroline, perhaps also in her attempt to balance the extreme coarseness of her husband, not by chance known as Re Lazzarone, the Rascal King, imported plenty of fashion from France, Paris’ haute couture and haute cuisine, along with tailors and chefs.
It was then that in Naples, aristocratic and rich families began to have French chefs in their service. In the streets they were called “Monzù” (or “Munzù”), a corruption of the French word “Monsieur.” With the Monzù began the era of “sciù” (choux), “graten” (gratin), “gattò” (gâteau), “besciamella” (béchamel) and of course babà. The Neapolitan adaptation of the names made the French origins increasingly obscure.
Maison Stohrer, Paris (France)
In those decades, the ancestor of Neapolitan babà, though still soaked in fortified wine, was possibly sold in Paris at the Maison Stohrer, in rue Montorgueil, in the Châtelet-Les Halles district, which still today is the oldest pastry shop of the French capital. The pâtisserie had been opened in 1730 by Nicholas Stohrer, who had arrived in town in 1725, as a chef of the Polish Maria Leszczyńska, after she married the French king Louis XV. Stohrer had previously been in service to the Queen’s father, the exiled king of Poland, Stanisław Bogusław Leszczyński (1677-1766).
Stanisław Leszczyński, former King of Poland
The legend has it that, at the beginning of the 18th century in the Alsatian town of Lunéville, King Stanisław was served a local sweet, called kugelhupf, a big cake, baked originally in a special circular enamelled pan with a central tube and made of a soft spongy yeast dough containing raisins, almonds and kirschwasser (cherry brandy), and sometimes candied fruits. Known in German as gugelhupf, this sweet with slight variations is common to many countries, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Alsace and other Eastern Europe nations. In Bosnia, Hungary and Serbia is called kuglof, bàbovka in the Czech Republic and babka or baba in Poland.
The gugelhupf
Polish Baba
Polish babka
According to the same legend, Stanislaw’s babka was too dry, so in a moment of irate disappointment, he threw it across the room and broke a bottle of rum in doing so. The pastry fell into the rum and the exiled King tried it and found it excellent. The legend adds that he called the new dessert “baba” in homage to Ali Baba, the character of the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights. Nothing could be further from the truth: baba comes from the Polish sweet, it’s diminutive form of babka that in Slavonic languages means “grandmother”.
In reality, it was Stohrer, Stanislaw’s pastry chef, who possibly overcame the dryness of the kugelhupf by adding Malaga wine, saffron, raisins and crême pâtissière. Rum, followed at some stage, soon after. As a matter of fact, Courchamps in the Dictionnaire Général de la Cuisine Française, 1839, states that the descendants of Stohrer, at the Maison of Rue Montorgueil, were still serving the baba with a saucier containing sweet Malaga wine mixed with one sixth of Tanaisie (tansy) Liqueur.
By that time, however, babà soaked in rum had already spread and, as we have already said, was already known both in Naples and the rest of Italy (in a plain version, pretty much similar to the present one). Babà underwent other variations in France: in the middle of the 1840s, Auguste Julien created a baba variant, using the same dough but replacing the raisins with finely chopped candied orange zest, and baked it in a ring mould. Then he soaked it in rum or kirsch syrup and filled the centre with pastry cream and fresh fruit. He called it Savarin, as in homage to the great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), who, according to another legend, had passed the recipe on to Julien. But that’s another story, which has little or nothing to do with Babà alla Napoletana.
Contemporary Babà soaked in limoncello, La Fermata Restaurat - Spinetta Marengo, Alessandria
In the last ten to fifteen years, beginning on Capri and the Amalfi Coast, yet another version of babà – this time soaked in limoncello rather than rum – has appeared. And it’s a successful trend, copied in restaurants all around the world, which connects babà to the flavour of the land that has most loved it. Is this just fashion or could it be a newborn tradition?
Rosario Scarpato
