Chocolate Almond Cake

This recipe for chocolate-almond cake is four hundred years old, and was passed down orally in one Bayonne family from mother to daughter in Spanish, Ladino, and then French. The accent of rum was probably introduced in the seventeenth century. My guess is that at first the eggs would have been whole, and later separated, the whites whipped to give it more height, probably in the eighteenth century. This cake can be made with matzo cake meal for Passover.