Tiramisu Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The leading account holds that tiramisu was created at a shop in Treviso, in the Veneto region of northern Italy, sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s, though neighboring Friuli has an account that places it earlier. That it is a new sweet of the later 20th century is well supported by the record; but when it comes to the question of which shop made it first, several accounts still stand side by side.

What gave rise to this dessert was the postwar life built around coffee. Milk, eggs, and sugar were all long-familiar ingredients, and so were the two other stars, mascarpone and the finger biscuits called savoiardi. What changed was that espresso became something pulled and drunk every day, widely. Soaking biscuits in strong espresso and layering them with mascarpone cream became possible only once espresso had settled into daily life and refrigeration had reached ordinary homes, in the northern Italy of the postwar years.

The conditions for an uncooked, cold layered sweet came together in the second half of the 20th century. Its setting is modern too: it arose not from household lore but from the commercial world of restaurants and pastry shops, and spread from there into homes and across borders.

The origin of tiramisu is not a "tradition invented after the fact" like the Margherita of Naples. If anything the opposite: its past is so recent that two regions are matching documentary records to contest which came first, in a dispute still under way.

The leading account traces it to a shop in Treviso. The owner's wife and a pastry chef are said to have devised it around 1969 to 1972, its distinctive feature being the use of egg yolks alone. What strengthens this account is that two separate threads meet in the same window of years. One is the word. "Tiramisù" first enters the dictionaries in Italian in 1980 and in English in 1982, and its root goes back to the Treviso-area dialect tireme su ("lift me up, pick me up"). The other is a written record. Giuseppe Maffioli, a local food historian, tied the sweet to Le Beccherie in Treviso and to the late 1960s and early 1970s in the spring 1981 issue of the magazine Vin Veneto, and set it down again in his book La cucina trevigiana (1983). As the account of a food historian who was close to the events in time, rather than a shop's own claim, this carries weight. In 2010 the Italian Academy of Cuisine registered the shop's recipe as the authentic Treviso version.

Contesting priority is the account that places its origin in neighboring Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and it covers two places. One is the Albergo Roma, a hotel in Tolmezzo, where the cook Norma Pielli is said to have served it in the 1950s; the family puts the year she devised it at 1953 or 1954. This version differs from Treviso's in that the egg whites, too, are whipped and folded in. The other is the Al Vetturino in Pieris, whose half-frozen tirime su is put forward as earlier still, though its year is given variously as 1938, as 1946, and as sometime in the 1940s or 1950s. It was a sweet of whipped cream and chocolate, made without mascarpone. In 2017 Friuli's tiramisu was registered as a traditional food of the region, and it competes with the Treviso version for precedence.

On the Friuli side, more than word of mouth has been reported: a dated record. It is a bill from the Tolmezzo hotel, dated 13 December 1959, on which is written "tirami su per 2" (tiramisu for two). Clara and Gigi Padovani reproduce it on page 21 of their book Tiramisù (2016), according to both the couple's own article (2017) and a review in the Italian newspaper il Giornale (2016); the review adds that without this one sheet, the Friuli story would still rest on oral sources alone. What is known of the bill, though, goes only as far as these reports. If the reported date holds, it falls more than ten years before 1970, the year Roberto Linguanotto, the pastry chef at the Treviso shop, said he began making the dessert. The word, on the other hand, reaches the dictionaries only in 1980, and the 2017 registration is an administrative recognition of tradition, not a record from the period itself. Which came first remains unsettled. Egg yolks alone or egg whites folded in, Treviso or Friuli: this difference suggests that separate lines of recipe may have grown up in parallel in different places. Tiramisu is closer to the surviving evidence when read as a young sweet whose origin several places claim, records in hand, than as something that can be pinned to a single inventor.