CHIAVARI, Italy –A few years back,
when I lived in Milan, I worked for Women’s Wear Daily, a fashion newspaper based in New York. As a journalist, I never worked alone. None
of the journalists did, nor do they now. We were always assigned photographers and
while all the photographers were nice, my favorite was Davide Maestri.
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| Treviso, Italy |
Davide started working for WWD when
the office in Milan first opened and he knew everyone in the business. He also
knew all the ins and outs of the Italian fashion world. Women’s Wear Daily is
owned by publishing giant Conde Nast, so his photographs made the front pages
not just of WWD, but all the sister publications like W and Vogue, Vogue
Italia, as well as many other fashion magazines and newspapers in Italy and the
USA, and they still do.
We covered a lot of assignments
together, years of assignments, not only in Milan but in Florence, Bologna,
Lake Como and lots of places in between. I really liked working with him, he
was the consummate professional but he had one little quirk. He wouldn’t eat in
a restaurant unless they had tiramisu’
on the dessert menu. He loved tiramisu. He was mad for tiramisu, so much so
that over the years he had become a tiramisu expert. No matter what city we
were in, he knew which restaurants made the best tiramisu, and why it was the best.
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| Antico Ristorante Le Beccherie |
I often teased him about his passion
and said that he and I should write a book about tiramisu, but he didn’t care
about writing a book or even taking photos of it, he just liked to eat it. I
confess, it’s okay as a dessert but I thought its history was interesting, even
if much of the food history here in Italy is a bit muddled. The tiramisu story that I like best dates
back to the late 1800’s and a bordello in the northern town of Treviso, a short
distance from Venice.
It seems that the bordellos in
Treviso were always trying to come up with ways to attract new clients, or
steal them from their competition. When one bordello began offering a cup of espresso
coffee to its patrons, the other bordellos in town soon followed suit. As
competition heated up, some bordellos began offering savoiardi cookies (lady
fingers) to dunk in the cups of espresso coffee, or a glass of wine or other
alcoholic beverages.
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| Le Beccheirie's Tiramisu |
One enterprising Madam, who probably
didn’t have a sufficient supply of savoiardi cookies on hand, decided to
combine the cookies with the coffee and bind it together with Mascarpone cheese
and eggs. She named her dish Tiramisu, which means “pick me up”, a
tongue-in-cheek way of saying some of her clients may have need of a little
“pick me up” after visiting the ladies of the house. It may also have been an
incentive to get the men up and out, instead of wanting to hang around and take
a nap.
This story is highly contested by
Treviso’s Antico Ristorante Le Beccherie which claims the dish was first prepared by
the restaurant's pastry chef, Loly Linguanotto, less than two decades ago. Their story is
that back in 1970, after the birth of her son, Ada Campoel, the owner of Le Beccherie, wanted to create a desert that would give her energy.
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| A Few Simple Ingredients |
Truthfully, I think the bordello
story is more credible because Ada could have just cooked up a pot of spinach
or radicchio, which is one of the top crops in Treviso, and she would have had energy to spare. But it’s not for me to
judge. Instead, here are two recipes for
tiramisu. The first recipe is from Giuliano Bugialli’s Classic Techniques of Italian
Cooking. While Bugialli makes his own marscapone cheese and ladyfingers, trust
me, if you buy good quality mascarpone and lady fingers, it will work just
fine. The second is a video demonstration on how to make tiramisu, which you will find at the bottom of this page.
Giuliano Bugialli's Tiramisu
Serves 12
8 ounces of
bittersweet chocolate
24 ladyfingers*
2 cups of strong
espresso coffee cooled
6 eggs separated
6 heaping tablespoons
of granulated sugar
1 lb of marscapone
*if using
store bought ladyfingers toast them in a 375 degree oven for about 15 minutes.
Chop the
chocolate coarsely.
Put the
ladyfingers on a plate and lightly brush them with the cold coffee
Arrange
half of the ladyfingers in a rectangular or oval dish, at least 2” high
Use a wooden spoon to mix the egg
yolks together with the sugar in a ceramic bowl. Mix until the sugar is
completely incorporated and the egg yolks have turned a lighter color. Then add
the mascarpone and stir gently. In a copper (or glass) bowl beat the egg whites
with a wire whisk until they are stiff. Gently fold the whiles into the
mascarpone-egg yolk mixture.
Use half of this mixture to make a
layer on top of the ladyfingers in the serving dish. Sprinkle with half of the
chopped chocolate. Repeat the procedure to make another layer of soaked
ladyfingers, the mascarpone mixture and the chopped chocolate.
Cover with aluminum foil and
refrigerate for at least 2 hours before serving.
The second recipe is a video recipe
(in English) that demonstrates another Tiramisu recipe. They are basically the
same recipe, with just a couple of small differences. For example, the cook on
the video does not toast the ladyfingers, but that may be because the
ladyfingers sold in Italy are already toasty enough. I’m not sure. The video is
from a very good Italian cooking site called Giallo Zafferano, and I’m sure
Davide would give both of these recipe a thumbs up.
Link to
tiramisu video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at3lDNBGJlA
