Il baba | eatparade
The baba is a sweet treat that as an immigrant from northern sources, has become a traditional neapolitan cake of neapolitan pastry manufacture exclusive, which will protect the basic ingredients of the recipe that determine the flavor and essence. This cake is considered a typical neapolitan, a veritable food totem, as it is not only a sweet mystic and ritual, but is entered in the language, in festive meals, and in everyday life neapolitan.
Was the case in the Baba’s birth; to invent it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was a Polish King, Stanislaus Leszczynski. Legend has it that he had the idea of dunking in Madeira, a fortified wine produced in Malaga, a kugelopf, the traditional dessert of central Europe, which resembles a cake. It is a sweet, simple shape that differs from that sweets were prepared so complex shapes of Rococo inspiration. King dedicated his creation to Ali Baba, his favorite character in the tales of the thousand and one nights.
After the King’s death, the territories of Lorraine returned to France and took French citizenship babà. The noble sweet, could not arrive at Versailles, and there was much appreciated by Queen Antoinette, which spread throughout the city.
If the Baba is born in Paris is certainly rising in Naples, and this second birth is decisive for the history of a cake that owes its reputation mainly to the Neapolitan version. In its long journey, “light“, gets rid of raisins and candied fruits, buy new identity and by adding a “b” will become babbà, acquiring the name a neapolitan identity.