The origin moves through several countries and one exiled king. Stanisław Leszczyński, former King of Poland and later Duke of Lorraine, is the figure at the center of the story. Forced from the Polish throne and settled in France in the early eighteenth century, he brought with him a taste for babka — a Polish enriched yeast cake — and a pastry chef named Nicolas Stohrer. The account most often repeated is that Leszczyński found the local kugelhopf too dry and had Stohrer soak it in Tokay wine to make it edible. Whether that story is precisely accurate or has been polished through retelling is debated, but what is documented is that Stohrer opened a pâtisserie on rue Montorgueil in Paris in 1730 — still operating today as the oldest pastry shop in the city — and that the rum version of the baba was being sold there by the 1730s, with rum substituted for wine as French Caribbean trade made it widely available. The name baba is likely derived from the Polish babka, though one version attributes it to Leszczyński himself, who supposedly named the dessert after Ali Baba from One Thousand and One Nights.

A related but distinct dessert, the savarin, was developed by Parisian pâtissiers in 1844 — same soaked yeast cake concept, ring-shaped instead of cylindrical, without the dried fruit that early babas sometimes contained. The two exist in parallel and are often conflated on restaurant menus. The baba au rhum also traveled to Naples, where it became the babà napoletano — a different shape, a different syrup ratio, and a cultural adoption so complete that Neapolitans now claim it as their own. The Paris version remains the reference point: small, cylindrical, cream-topped, and aggressively soaked.

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Regional Roots

• France