Zuppa inglese literally means English soup, but this Italian dish is actually a rich dessert made by soaking a sponge cake in cherry brandy, filling it with custard, covering it with Italian meringue, and then browning it in an oven. The dish was invented in the nineteenth century by Italian ice-cream makers who called it zuppa because the sponge cake sat in a “soup” of brandy and custard, and inglese because they wanted to associate it with the English puddings fashionable across Europe at the time. Despite this indirect connection with the English, the name of the dessert did not appear in English until the early 1970s.