An Instant Classic
I remember with Proustian clarity the first time I had tiramisú at Café Dante in New York’s West Village, where I spent many nights of my teenage years as a weekend ex-pat from Brooklyn. The not yet trendy dessert exemplified the Italian genius for suffusing gracefully light substance with intense flavor—case in point: gelato. Did you know that gelato has less milk cream in it than American ice cream? So much less that it even falls below the legal standard to be branded “ice cream”. The impression it gives of creaminess comes from richness of flavor and refinement of texture. It’s art perfecting nature, not just packaging it.
Tiramisú is the Italian answer to English trifle. Trifle has the exuberance of the barbarian about it, with its voluptuous mounding of luxuries: whipped heavy cream between deposits of rum-soaked sponge cake, strewn with fruits both fresh and liquored, along with any other trifle fancy may suggest be thrown in to boot. Italians have a dessert inspired by it called zuppa inglese (“English soup”), in which ladyfinger biscuits are dunked in sweet vermouth and then layered with yellow pastry cream, of the sort my mother’s people call French cream. For a while before they came to America, her father had a café in Sacco that my mother ran, and she fondly remembers making gelato and zuppa inglese to offer for sale. But the very name tells you that, however much the Italians enjoyed this confection, they felt it as foreign.
Not so with tiramisú. The name means “pick-me-up”, no doubt because of the espresso in which the ladyfingers are soaked—which are called savoiardi in Italian (suggesting that they are perhaps an import from the French House of Savoy, although it’s unclear whether Savoyan cooks weren’t in fact Italians, making the name a faux ami. I surely need not recall for you, Gentle Reader, that the foundations of French haute cuisine were laid by the Neapolitan cooks Catherine de Medici brought with her from Italy to France?). The history of tiramisu’s origins, though quite modern, is controverted, and far less interesting and less charming than the origins of my own recipe, which I’ll tell instead.
