Most countries have an iconic chef, one who is familiar to every person on the street. The UK has Jamie Oliver (Sorry Gordon), France has Joel Robuchon aand Thailand has now……..well, the iron chefs. British food is undergoing a resurgence, as French food is with the new generation of ‘Fooding’ guys. Thailand, hopefully, will always have the street food vendors, but for Thai cuisine by a Thai person?
Enter Chef McDang…….
I hear this time and time again from frequent visitors to Thailand. ”We always want to go to Huahin, but its sooo far away” If the words ‘Crab Heaven’ make your legs go tingly and jaws tightened in anticipation for cracking shells, you need to take the 2 – 4 hour journey from Bangkok to Huahin. This place….of course, is 30 – 60mins away in Pranburi, google ‘Pranburi Resorts’ if you intend to stay there instead of the main tourist hub of Huahin.
This is another ‘Blast from the past’ post. 2009.
No visit to Paris for pastry geeks should exclude a visit to the temple of one of pastry’s greatest cakes, Storher at Rue Montorgeuil near Les Halles in Paris. Storher made the original Rum Baba, a simple yeast leavened cake soaked in copious amounts of Rum.
Historians (Read, the internet) says that a greedy Polish king exiled to Alsace made a Rum Baba by soaking a rich, German cake, called a Gugelhopf in alcohol. He was as well a fan of ‘A thousand and one nights’, thus he named his creation a Baba au Rhum.
There might be a bit of history twisting there in regards to the origins of the name, as Babka is a similar cake in Poland, and Baba (According to the internet) means to be dizzy or ‘fall over’ in French. This same Baba au Rhum is called Borracho in Spain, which means ‘Drunk’.
Regardless the origins of the name, we can all agree that this is one helluva cake that gives you a good boozy horsekick. Nicolas Stohrer, a patissier in the King’s court brought it to Paris with the King’s daughter and the rest is history. Mixed with butter, eggs and strong flour, this rich dough is left to rise either in cylindrical molds (Like in the pictures above), or in round circle molds with a dimple in the middle.
After the dough has risen and baked like bread, its left to dry out a bit before being soaked in hot rum syrup. Simple adorned with candied cherry and angelica as above, its the original Baba au Rhum. Bake it in a round circle mold, pipe whipped cream on it adorned with fresh fruits, and it becomes a Savarin.
The original version fed to the King is said to have been a dough perfumed with Saffron and soaked in Malaga wine. I guess we’d have no choice but to make it ourselves if we would like to feast like an exiled King!
When Stohrer set up shop in Rue Montorgeuil (The shop still stands today!), he made the current version with rum only. Biting into it, the strong Baba dough gives a nice chew, releasing sweet alcohol shots with every bite.
Conclusion
Well worth a try, if you are in Paris, because it is a nice way to get some extra ‘legs’ from all that walking. Personally, its a pleasant cake, but not one I’d go googoo about. I’d sure like to try the original with Saffron and Malaga wine, as it sounds like a more flavourful counterpart to this one. If I walked past Stohrer again, what the heck, I’d still buy it to have a taste of history!
This is a very memorable meal from the past, waaaay back in 2009, when I was living around 30mins walk away from St John Bread and Wine in London. However, this is at the main, St John restaurant, where we tucked ourselves into one of the most memorable meals of my life.
The simple surroundings, bare, white walls with simple wooden chairs and tables, spoke volumes on how St John went about its food. Its unfussy, but downright brilliant in its simplicity. Not many chefs or restaurants in the world can make the kind of food that we ate that night, and I have never eaten anything similar since.
Potential 2 hour traffic jam? 30mins minimum waiting time for your table? Not so far, but not so near to the city? You’re dependent on a taxi to bring you to Ram-Intra? Speak no Thai?
But……you’ve just landed in Bangkok, as have I, and you are craving craving craving for some seafood, local style. You’re tired, cranky, desperate in need of some stomach lovin’ and wanna boost your cholesterol levels up a notch. Do you REALLY want to come here?
“Qu’ils Mangent de la Brioche!” or perhaps, “Let them eat their tea cakes!”, as Anne Boleyn actually mouthed before she was given ‘Le Chop’. The “eating brioche’ part was actually said by someone else and mistakenly attributed to Anne Boleyn. You read it here first, through lots of dubious research, I have uncovered a famous quote lost to history just until now*.
As fascinatingly brutal as that era was, we can be grateful that Henry VIII’s and Anne Boleyn’s brief pairing gave birth to this delicious tea cake called a ‘Maid of Honour’. The best place, according to marketing hype, to eat this is at Newens at Kew Gardens in Richmond, London.
According to folklore, Henry VIII first met Anne Boleyn when she was a Maid of Honour. This historical event took place at his Richmond Palace, and he fell in love with her eating this dainty little pastry. Love never tasted so sweet, and if this story has a romantic ring of regality to it, there is also a dark story attached, if you believe the myth (As printed on Newen’s website). However, it would not be surprising if this story was true, considering Henry VIII’s reputation.
Now Henry VIII’s key achievements were plenty, not excluding breaking away from the Catholic Church, beheading 2 of his wives, of which one had a younger sister who was his mistress prior and executing tens of thousands of people (72,000+ according to a less than trustable internet source*). His daughter, Queen Mary 1, is credited with burning around 300 Protestants to their deaths and thus, earning the nickname, ‘Bloody Mary’, to whom bar-goers and bartenders around the world pay homage to with a shake of the jigger*. Back to the dark story……
Yonks ago in the middle ages, when the Romans ran amok in England building bath-houses, glorifying Gladiators and murdering masses of people under the banner of ‘The Crusades’, Spain was itself undergoing a transformation of kinds. At the bottom end of Spain lies the Mediterranean sea, and just across the pond, Morocco. It was then occupied by the so-called Moors, a misnomer for a mixture of peoples from Berbers to Iberian Muslims to Arabs.
