With ladyfingers or pavesini. With or without cream. Classic or decomposed. With pistachio or strawberries. With matcha or nutella tea. With raw eggs or with pate a bombe. However you prepare it, tiramisu is and remains the dessert that no one can give up. The excellence of the Italian pastry best known in the world. To prove this, a study by the Italian Crusca Academy according to which Tiramisu is the fifth word of Italian cuisine best known abroad and is present as gastronomic Italianism in 23 languages.
Tiramisu day
The spoon dessert with layers of ladyfingers dipped in coffee alternating with layers of cream with mascarpone, sugar and eggs, closed with a sprinkling of bitter cocoa has even a day dedicated to him. On March 21, together with spring, we celebrate the tiramisu day. Italian dessert most famous in the world and, in 2017, the most ordered at home in Italy (9.400 kg), it could not fail to be celebrated with dignity.
A curious legend
The etymology of the word is easy to understand: pull me up, lift me (the soul or the body). A curious legend reveals that the name of the dessert is not accidental at all. It is said to have originated as "natural viagra". The creator of the dessert made with beaten eggs, coffee and biscuits seems to have been one madam of a pleasure house. He thought of an energetic and strengthening dessert to offer to customers at the end of the evening, served with the phrase "Now I pull on me", in order to corroborate them before their return to the family.
The origin of tiramisu
Many have asked ourselves: who should we thank for having invented such a delight for our palates?
Scholars of the subject have identified a document, dating back to 1952, in which the term appears for the first time Tiramisu. This is the menu of a restaurant in Tolmezzo, in the province of Udine. A receipt also comes out of this place, dated December 13, 1959, among which the word appears again.
Mrs Norma Pielli, owner of the Ristorante Roma, reworked the Sweet Turin, a dessert made with biscuits soaked in Alchèrmes and butter cream. The cook replaced the red liqueur with coffee and butter cream with one with mascarpone, egg yolks and whipped egg whites. The customers of the place went crazy for this prescription, they noticed the strengthening properties of this sweet that 'lifted'. Within a few years they no longer requested it as "Trancia al mascarpone", the name that appeared on the menu, but as Tiramisu.
The Treviso origins
Other sources claim that the dessert originated in Treviso in the restaurant At Fogher. A princess arriving from Greece stopped there for lunch one day in 1958. The mistress, Speranza Bon, prepared the "Imperial Cup": a single portion with a base of sponge cake soaked in coffee stuffed with mascarpone cream and egg yolks.
The restaurant also contends for the originality of the recipe At the Beccherie. Of the tiremesu this cuisine was mentioned for the first time in 1981 in a magazine. The casual birth of the dessert was told, by Alba Campeol, starting with the reinterpretation of banged, the beaten egg that you had for breakfast, as well as coffee. The chef revisited the recipe, from which he removed the egg whites, and included it in the fixed menu with the name "Tiramesù sweet Gioioso et Amoroso".
Diatribes on the authorship of tiramisu
The opening of a Tiramisu Museum. Anticipated, however, by the establishment of a counter at the Casa dei Carraresi open to anyone who wants to bring testimonies, photos, anecdotes about the dessert and converse with Carlo Campeol, son of the woman who codified the recipe.
The aim is to claim the paternity of the cake that the Ministry of Agriculture in 2010 attributed, instead, to the Friulian city, bearing as proof that receipt from the 50s. Campeol himself presented as counter-proof a notarial deed from the Italian Academy of Cuisine in which it is written that the original recipe of "Pull it up" is that of his family restaurant.
