The Boozy History of Baba au Rhum

The French have an insatiable sweet tooth, and a trip to Paris would be incomplete without tasting a crispy vanilla cream-filled Napoleon, having a generous slice of opera cake, or feasting on a bag of chouquettes or macarons. While éclairs, crème brûlée and tarte tatin can be found in every corner patisserie, at each classic bistro and even in the city’s most revered Michelin restaurants these days, few desserts garner the same attention as the baba au rhum. The boozy dessert drenched in a rum syrup and served alongside a luscious portion of Chantilly cream has remained in fashion since being first consumed by Parisians in the early 18th century.

“Baba au rhum is more than just a dessert; it’s a symbol of an enduring culinary heritage and a testament to the timeless appeal of French pastry,” says chef Hélène Darroze. Baba au rhum is the signature dessert at her acclaimed restaurant Marsan in Paris. “It is a true gem of French pastry-making, and it’s no wonder that it has stood the test of time,” she says. “Making baba is a way for me to honor and preserve a piece of my culinary history.”

Unlike many French desserts that require a delicate touch from a professional pastry chef, the baba au rhum is forgiving and achievable for the average home cook. The purposefully dried-out cake is resuscitated with booze and served unapologetically with a copious amount of cream for that oh là là moment at the dining table.

The most venerable form of baba au rhum is found at one of France’s most beloved restaurants: chef Alain Ducasse’s Le Meurice. Considered the godfather of French cuisine, Ducasse is universally known for his high gastronomy and 21 Michelin stars—not to mention his baba au rhum. While he serves the dessert in all of his 34 restaurants around the world, nothing beats the original Ducasse baba at Le Meurice. It is here, in the Belle Époque-style dining room in Paris’ Hôtel Le Meurice, where the baba is served table-side with vintage rums from the Caribbean. The dessert is delicate, light and, yes, extra boozy. Yet, for the French, the baba au rhum is a far cry from the most elegant dessert out there.

“The baba au rhum, in its non-garnished state, is a delicious but fairly plain pastry,” making it “just as appropriate at a family meal” as at a Michelin-starred spot, says Maryann Tebben, a French scholar and director of the Center for Food and Resilience at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts.

But there is something magical in that simplicity.

“The French are well known for pastries and justly praised for their artistry in this domain. As with other elements of French cuisine, artistry is key,” the author of Savoir-Faire: A History of Food in France says. “The ingredients may be simple, such as using flour, butter, sugar, but when perfectly executed, they are an eye for beauty.”

A tasty history

While the baba au rhum dessert doesn’t sound like it has French roots (the word “baba” is a Persian honorific term), the French do claim it. The original Parisian pastry shop, Stohrer, where French pastry chef Nicolas Stohrer first sold his famous baba au rhum in 1730 still stands, and, to this day, continues to serve tens of thousands of rum cakes to both travelers and locals with untamable sweet tooths each year.

“I would say that the rum baba, as we know it, is first and foremost a creation of 19th-century Parisian pastry-making, but, nevertheless, it has obvious Polish roots,” says Loïc Bienassis, project manager at the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food, and author of a new book on the culinary history of the Château de Chambord. Bienassis believes that the modern-day baba eaten in Paris was created from the original Polish babka, with the word used interchangeably and adapted by Parisian chefs to this day. “In Polish, the word baba means ‘old woman,’ and the first known use of the word to describe the baba cake dates back to 1642, when it was a yellow saffron cake,” he says.

What was once a luxury pastry in the 19th century has definitely become a permanent fixture in French culture and remains popular, with pastry shops and restaurants all selling these champagne cork-shaped babas soaked in rum.

The first time I tasted a baba au rhum was in Alsace, a region bordering Germany and Switzerland in northeastern France and known for exquisite rieslings and grand crus. Home to hills and vineyards, Alsace is a stomping ground for oenophiles looking to sample silvaner, pinot noir and cremant, and foodies wanting to try coq au riesling, baeckeoffe (a hearty stew made with riesling) and baba au rhum. Alsace, after all, is the birthplace of the sweet treat, which was originally doused with wine, not rum.

“In my mind, the baba slowly transformed from a borrowed dish into a French dish when it began to appear in works of literature as part of a litany of French pastries associated with decadence and deliciousness,” says Tebben, who has studied works of literature and visual art for references to the dessert. “Evidence points to Marie-Antoine Carême giving a recipe for ‘baba polonais’ in his 1815 Le pâtissier royal parisien, evoking its supposed Polish origins.”

Its most famous appearance is probably in the 1987 film Babette’s Feast, in which it is served decorated with whipped cream and glacé fruits as the culmination of a decadent meal prepared by the fictional female chef of the Café Anglais in Paris, herself in exile from the Prussian occupation of 1871, Tebben explains. “This transformation happened over the 19th century, and by the time the baba appears in Babette’s Feast, it has become fully French,” she says.

While different mythical lores behind the invention of the baba au rhum persist, the most popular story stems from an exiled king, a royal engagement and an inventive pastry chef saving an unpalatable piece of dry cake with booze.

“A series of stories revolve around Stanisław Leszczyński [1677-1766], king of Poland exiled in France and made Duke of Lorraine, who is said to have invented it or at least introduced the Polish baba into the kingdom of Louis XV, while he was living in his palace at Lunéville in Lorraine,” says Bienassis.

The belief is that the baba au rhum was invented at a party hosted by Leszczyński in Alsace in the early 18th century. Wanting to impress his friends, the exiled Polish king asked his pastry chef, Nicolas Stohrer, to throw wine on the Alsatian kugelhopf (a raisin-filled yeast cake) and light it on fire, which proved a hit with his guests.

“Stanislaw’s ‘babka’ was so named because the exiled king had a fond fascination for the Middle Eastern folk tale ‘One Thousand and One Nights,’ and so named the sweet treat after the character Ali Baba,” says Tebben.

But how did it come to Paris? And how did rum replace Alsatian wine?

A fortuitous marriage between Stanislaw’s daughter Maria and King Louis XV saw the baba au vin reinvented as baba au rhum. Maria Leszczyńska married and moved to Versailles, bringing her pastry chef, Stohrer, with her. It was believed that in Versailles Stohrer added rum instead of wine and eventually started selling it to Parisians when he opened his own patisserie, Stohrer, on rue Montorgueil, which currently stands as the oldest pastry shop in Paris. Although it is no longer run by the original Stohrer family, the owners, the Dolfi family, are the very same family who run France’s oldest chocolate shop, À la Mère de Famille.

“Our house is still renowned for the invention of baba au rhum, which was invented by Nicolas Stohrer, King Louis XV’s pastry chef, and we perpetuate tradition, and the baba is still made according to the house recipe,” says Steve Dolfi, one of the four siblings running the 250-year-old chocolate institute in Paris.

“We see ourselves as ‘guardians’ to protecting and promoting traditional recipes and establishments to pass on France’s confectionary heritage,” says Dolfi. “Our mission is to safeguard France’s chocolate and confectionery heritage, and so when we had the opportunity in 2017 to acquire Stohrer, the oldest patisserie in Paris, it was a dream to bring our family-run business, À la Mère de Famille, together with Stohrer.”

Baba au rhum is the signature dessert at Stohrer, which sells a collection of French pastry classics including Saint-Honoré, macarons and chocolate éclairs. “Our grandmother, who cooked divinely, took great pleasure in preparing baba au rhum to show how much she loved us, and she passed on her love of good food to all of us Dolfi kids,” says Dolfi.

The making of baba au rhum

The plain pastry is a yeasted dough (or cork-shaped savarin, for those who know their pastries) left out to dry for at least 24 hours before being soaked in a boozy sugar syrup. Fans of the late Julia Child might remember her baba au rhum episode on PBS’s “The French Chef,” when she opened her show with vigorous slapping of unleavened dough on her kitchen counter, telling her audience that the timeless French dessert is “lots of fun to make, and it’s just deliciously fattening to eat, so you have to be a little bit careful.” Child assures her audience that while the bread-like cake can be intimidating to the novice chef, it can lead to other great bakes like “rolls, and fancy breads, and croissants, and brioche.”

Babas Au Rhum | The French Chef Season 3 | Julia Child

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The dough seems to be contradictory in method: The sweetened yeasted bread is made with an exorbitant amount of butter to get a softer-than-usual crumb and then dried out, only to then be plumped up again with a syrup of rum and sugar. This process leads to the most superbly tasting baba au rhum, says Tana Rattananikom, head chef of Cumulus Inc., a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, that serves its baba with aged rum and crème diplomat. “It will take some time [to master], and every step is important, so if you are making this at home expect failure before success, but once perfected, you will reap the rewards,” says Rattananikom.

For French chefs, the baba au rhum is a rite of passage.

“The baba au rhum was one of the first desserts I made as an apprentice at my father’s bakery in France,” says Florian Tetart, chef instructor at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado. “My initial attempts were either too soaked or too dry. Achieving a great baba au rhum requires finding the perfect temperature and timing.”

Chef Louis Philippe Vigilant of La Côte d’Or, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in France’s Burgundy region, has made the rum-soaked dessert for more than two decades. “The baba au rhum is one of the first desserts we learned at culinary school, because the foundation of a great baba au rhum is the ‘sponge,’” says Vigilant. Now, the dessert is more than just a daily chore for gastronomes who visit his revered restaurant in the south of France, where rum is as prevalent as wine.

“I have always loved making baba au rhum because it reminds me of home,” says the chef, who was born in Martinique. “I remember when I was a child, I tasted the dessert for the first time, and I was drunk immediately. I was just 10 years old, but the memory has stayed with me.”

Can you ever overdo the booze? Vigilant doesn’t think so. It’s not like pure alcohol is poured over the dessert; alcohol is added to the syrup in an amount based on personal preference.

Timing is key when soaking the babas, says Tetart, but it all depends on how much booze you want to taste in your dessert. “The best way to determine the ideal soaking time is to experiment with one baba first,” he says. “Time how long you let the baba soak in the syrup, then open it up and check the texture inside. If you prefer a subtle boozy flavor, simply simmer the rum and sugar together to evaporate some of the alcohol off before soaking your babas.”

Most chefs agree that the best way to serve a baba au rhum is with Chantilly cream, a sweet whipped cream with a hint of vanilla. “Its creaminess and sweetness are the perfect counterbalance to the aromas of the rum and the mellowness of the baba,” says Dolfi.

A chef’s take on tradition

Like most desserts that have passed through generations, the baba au rhum is a blank canvas open for reinvention.

Vigilant and his team have put their own modern spin on the dish, infusing their baba with pine trees. “The recipe makes complete sense because our restaurant is located in Saulieu, located in the heart of the Morvan Natural Park and home to France’s leading Christmas tree growing region, where more than one quarter of the country’s production is from our woods,” says the chef.

While rum is the best and most traditional alcohol used to soak the baba, Vigilant says that any alcohol works—except maybe port, which is too sweet and will change the color of the dessert. “In our recipe, we use fir liqueur, which further enhances the pine tree flavor,” he says.

While many chefs in Paris and around the world have riffed on the original baba au rhum recipe, the Dolfi family remain steadfast in maintaining traditions as best as they can.

“At Stohrer, we stay within the codes of traditional and classicism, but we admire the creativity in the world of patisserie—as long as it tastes good,” says Dolfi.

Alain Ducasse’s Baba au Rhum

Makes 4 babas au rhum

Ingredients

For the baba:

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/3 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons butter
• 1 vanilla pod, scraped

For the syrup:

• 4 1/4 cups water
• 2 1/2 cups caster sugar
• 1 orange, zested
• 1 lemon, zested

For the whipped cream:

• 2 cups whipping cream
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1/2 vanilla pod, scraped

To serve:

• Rum according to your taste
• 1/3 cup apricot glaze

Method

For the babas:

In a stand mixer, mix all the baba ingredients except the eggs together in a large bowl with a dough hook on medium speed. When the mixture’s texture resembles that of sand, slowly add one egg at a time. Mix until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 40 minutes.

Cover with a cloth and let rise. When the dough has doubled in volume (about one hour), deflate it with your fist.

Distribute the dough into buttered molds, by hand, or with a piping bag. Set aside once again until the dough doubles in size and even overflows above the mold slightly.

Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for five minutes, then 356 degrees for eight to ten minutes. You want a golden-brown color and the baba to be slightly dried out. Unmold the babas as soon as they are cooked.

For the syrup:

In a saucepan, mix all the syrup ingredients together with a whisk and bring to a boil.

Set aside to infuse, and then add in the babas. The temperature should be about 113 degrees for the best saturation. Turn the babas over with a slotted spoon a little, and check that they soak through nicely and have a good bounce to them.

Place them on a rack so that they drain off any excess syrup.

For the whipped cream:

Cut the vanilla pod in half lengthwise. Scrape to recover the grains, and whip with the cream and sugar to obtain a fluffy and airy whipped cream.

To serve:

Arrange the babas on a dish and glaze with the apricot glaze.

For a bit of entertainment to please your guests, cut the babas in two and sprinkle them with aged rum, as we do at my restaurant. Serve with the whipped cream.

Michelle Tchea | READ MORE

Michelle Tchea is the owner of Chefs Collective and the author of five bestselling books on food, wine and global cuisines. Her work has been published by Time, Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure.