Zuppa Inglese (English Trifle)

History

Zuppa inglese is "English soup" that is neither English nor soup: a layered assembly of custard and liqueur-soaked cake widely thought to descend from the English trifle, which itself only reached its familiar form by the seventeenth century. Its birth is genuinely contested. One legend credits sixteenth-century court cooks of the Este dukes at Ferrara, said to have recreated the English trifle the Este rulers themselves had enjoyed on their frequent visits to the Elizabethan court. A competing story sets it in nineteenth-century Tuscany, where a cook for an English family near Florence improvised the trifle they missed. Giovanni Ballarini instead traces the modern form to early nineteenth-century Parma, where Vincenzo Agnoletti built a version around rum, the liqueur of English sailors. Alkermes, the scarlet liqueur that colors the dish, takes its name and its cochineal red from Arab trade. Giuliano Bugialli disputes every origin tale, arguing the name simply evokes that red against the English flag. Artusi, writing from Florence in 1891, records a Tuscan version: a flour-thickened pastry cream layered in a fluted mould with savoiardi steeped half in alkermes and half in white rosolio. The record does not settle which story, if any, is true.

Ingredients

• dl milk
• g sugar
• g flour or, better, powdered starch
• egg yolks
• vanilla
• g savoiardi (ladyfingers)
• white rosolio liqueur
• alkermes liqueur
• fruit preserve

Instructions

1. Make a pastry cream: work sugar with yolks, add flour then milk, and cook, stirring, until thickened; cool.
2. In a greased fluted mould, layer fruit preserve, cream, and ladyfingers dipped alternately in white rosolio and alkermes.
3. Repeat the layers to fill the mould, not over-soaking the ladyfingers.
4. Chill on ice, then turn out by dipping the mould briefly in hot water. Serves 7-8.