Tiramisu Is Everywhere. Thank This Italian Chef

Roberto Linguanotto, who died in July, is credited with creating the buzz-worthy coffee-flavoured dessert in the 1970s.

Simple, elegant and easy to make, tiramisu is a staple of Italian and non-Italian restaurants alike, virtually inescapable on all kinds of dessert menus. Made of strong, decadent ingredients such as creamy cheese and strong coffee, it can become tiring fast. But when it’s done correctly, those six simple ingredients – eggs, mascarpone, ladyfingers, espresso, cocoa powder and sugar – yield a fantastic pick-me-up. That is what “tiramisu” roughly translates to in Italian, after all.

Much maligned (and in turn, much defended), tiramisu is just as at home at an early aughts Cheesecake Factory or Nonna’s kitchen as it is in a bastion of fine dining.

It’s so simple that tiramisu seems to have been around forever: With some generous stretching of the imagination, you can picture a Renaissance artist enjoying a slice while painting a masterpiece. In reality, its origins are not all that distant.

Roberto Linguanotto is credited by many with inventing the dish in a restaurant kitchen in the early 1970s in Treviso, a city in the northeastern Italian region of Veneto. Known to his friends and colleagues as “Loli”, Linguanotto had been working as a pastry chef at the restaurant Le Beccherie when, in collaboration with Alba Campeol, the restaurant owner’s wife, he developed the recipe. Linguanotto says he accidentally dropped mascarpone in a bowl of eggs and sugar, liked the taste, and the pair worked from there, adding coffee and ladyfingers. They added the dessert to Le Beccherie’s menu in 1972. From there, it spread across Italy and, eventually, the world.

Linguanotto died in July at 81 after a long battle with an unknown illness. His death was met with condolences and statements from Veneto’s governor, Luca Zaia, who said Linguanotto “made a significant impact in the world of pastry”, and journalist Gigi Padovani, who became close with the chef and has written a book on tiramisu.

Friends and colleagues remember Linguanotto as a humble “man of few words”, which is perhaps why he didn’t publicly acknowledge himself as the creator of tiramisu until later in life, long after the dessert’s popularity had spread.

He wouldn’t have considered himself a baker, either. According to Francesco Redi, founder of the Tiramisu World Cup (an international baking competition) and a frequent collaborator with Linguanotto, the chef was much more in love with gelato, which he learned to make at a young age before briefly immigrating to Germany for work and finally coming back to Treviso. After Le Beccherie, he even opened his own gelateria where tiramisu was a menu fixture. But it was his signature no-bake dessert, and not his ice cream, that made him a known figure in some culinary circles.

As is the case with many food origin stories, though, tiramisu’s is contested. Most agree it originated in Treviso in the 1960s or 1970s. Some claim its beginnings can be found in Italian brothels from centuries past, but the theory isn’t as widely supported by food historians. The question of who exactly can claim that they invented the now-global dessert, though, remains contentious.

One Baltimore chef known for his bakery that once stood on the edge of the city’s Little Italy has argued that the title belongs to him. Carminantonio Iannaccone, who opened the now-shuttered bakery Piedigrotta in 2002 after moving to the United States from Treviso with his wife, told the Washington Post in 2007 that he created tiramisu after wanting to make a dish celebrating the “everyday flavours of the region”. Eggs, mascarpone, ladyfinger biscuits (known as savoiardi), strong coffee and some marsala became, in Iannaccone’s hands, an “elegant, free-standing cake”.

His brother Giuseppe, so the story goes, sold that recipe to Le Beccherie, who Iannaccone said passed it off as its own. At the time of the Post article, Beccherie owner Carlo Campeol called the theory “preposterous”.

The restaurant closed for a time in 2014 and quickly reopened under new owner Paolo Lai, who, in a written interview with the Post in Italian, called the dessert “the most important dessert of our country” and said it began with Linguanotto helping Campeol. On the restaurant’s website, the story goes that Alba Campeol first had the idea for tiramisu after her mother-in-law made her a simple sweet breakfast in 1955. She later brought Linguanotto in as a collaborator.

Iannaccone’s and Linguanotto’s versions differ. The former made his tiramisu with marsala, an Italian dessert wine. That version resonates with many contemporary tiramisus, including the Post’s own recipe, which often feature sweet wine, dark rum, brandy or some other liquor.

Linguanotto’s had nothing of the sort. That’s how the dessert is still made at Le Beccherie and how it’s made for the Tiramisu World Cup, which celebrates Linguanotto as the original creator and follows his version.

“Loli told me good tiramisu doesn’t taste like any of the six ingredients individually. It tastes like tiramisu; it’s balanced,” Redi said. Adding any liquor to the “traditional” tiramisus in his competition, the first few of which were judged by Linguanotto himself, Redi said, would throw off the flavours and force an “artificial” balance.

That’s not to say the recipe hasn’t strayed from the Treviso chef’s original vision. Since the dessert was formalised in the late 1970s in Le Beccherie’s kitchen, whole eggs are more frequently incorporated, rather than just the yolks, for example. The savoiardi, an integral ingredient that some replace with sponge cake, are sometimes kept on the crisp side rather than softened.

For colleagues such as Redi, tiramisu – and its continuing evolution – is just one small, important part of Linguanotto’s legacy. He was a hard worker, a dedicated chef and a family man. He was also a mentor to young chefs such as those in the Tiramisu World Cup. Lai called him a “very dear and kind person”.

When Linguanotto’s son called Redi soon after the chef’s death, Redi remembers sharing his own memories of Linguanotto, including an optimistic disposition he found inspiring. “I cannot cry,” Redi says he told the son that day, “because I remember your father always smiling.”

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