Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Rum Cream
Rum Cream
Take sponge biscuits and arrange them on a dish, joining each to the other with jam. (You can make a square or a circle or a sort of hollow tower.) Pour your rum over them till they are well soaked. Then pour over them, or into the middle of the biscuits, a vanilla cream like the foregoing recipe, but let it be nearly cold before you use it. Decorate the top with the whites of four eggs sweetened and beaten, or use fresh cream in the same way. Pineapple a l'Anvers Take some slices of pineapple, and cut off the brown spots at the edges. Steep them for three hours in a plateful of weak kirsch, or maraschino, that is slightly warmed. Cut some slices of plain cake of equal thickness, and glaze them. This is done by sprinkling sugar over the slices and placing them in a gentle oven. The sugar melts and leaves the slices glaces. Arrange the slices in a circle, alternating pineapple and cake, and pour over the latter an apricot marmalade thinned with kirsch or other liqueur. This dish looks very nice, and if whipped cream can be added it is excellent.
Two desserts have been run together on this page: an assembled rum-soaked biscuit cream, and a pineapple-and-cake wheel. Both are cold assembly jobs that depend on a custard or a jam made elsewhere in the book, so read the two together before starting.
- Sponge biscuitsThese are ladyfingers — Italian savoiardi or French boudoirs — not soft cake. Their dryness is the point: they must be able to absorb rum without collapsing, so avoid the very soft supermarket sponge fingers sold for trifle.
- The custard must be coolThis is the hinge. "Let it be nearly cold before you use it" — warm stirred custard poured over rum-soaked biscuits turns the whole structure to slurry. Cool the vanilla cream to room temperature or below, then assemble and refrigerate several hours so it sets against the biscuits.
- How much rumNo quantity is given. For a dish of roughly 20 ladyfingers, 1/2 to 3/4 cup is enough to soak them through without pooling. Brush or spoon it on rather than pouring, or the biscuits at the bottom drown while the top stays dry.
- Raw egg-white toppingThe four sweetened beaten whites are never cooked. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, take the recipe's own second option and use whipped cream, or use pasteurized whites.
- Yield and servingNo quantities are given beyond the four egg whites, so the size is up to you. Build it in a glass bowl if you are not confident of the "hollow tower" he custcustard in the middle, which a bowl does anyway.
- "A gentle oven" for the glazed cakeRead this as a slow oven, roughly 300-325°F. You are melting sugar on the surface of the cake slices, not baking them; watch closely, as it goes from glossy to scorched quickly. Slices of plain pound cake, cut to match the pineapple rings in thickness, work well.
- Kirsch and maraschino"Weak kirsch" probably means diluted, though it may simply mean a low-strength one; modern kirsch runs around 40% alcohol and will overwhelm the fruit. Cut it with a little water or syrup, warm it gently to speed absorption, and do not heat it over a flame.
- Apricot marmaladeThis is apricot jam, sieved to remove the pieces, then thinned with liqueur to a pourable glaze. Warm it slightly to loosen it, then let it cool before it goes over the cake.
- PineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme best known for stopping gelatin setting; it may also affect dairy if the two sit together, so add the cream at the last moment. Canned pineapple is safe on this count, the enzyme having been destroyed by heat.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes collected from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, with the proceeds going to relief work. Its dishes are recorded very tersely. Both desserts here belong to the family of assembled cold sweets that runs from the English trifle to the French charlotte: stale or plain biscuit, spirit to soften it, custard to bind, cream on top. "À l'Anvers" simply means "Antwerp style," and the presence of pineapple, kirsch and maraschino in an Antwerp dessert is a fair reminder that the city was one of Europe's great ports.