The Trail of Tiramisu

Indeed, it wasn't until the 1980s that published references to tiramisu began to appear. Two Treviso restaurants get the credit: El Toula (from cookbook authors Claudia Roden and Anna del Conte and Saveur magazine) and Le Beccherie (from several Italian magazines and cookbooks).

El Toula "was after us," Iannaccone said. "They print it because it's famous. We're not famous. And we don't care."

(Neither, for the record, does the owner of El Toula, Arturo Filippini. When reached by phone in Treviso, he admitted that El Toula had only "contributed" to the development of tiramisu. As far as he knew it was invented "sometime in the 1950s" in a casa chiuso -- a house of ill repute -- for women who, you guessed it, needed a pick-me-up.)

What Iannaccone does care about is the attribution to Le Beccherie. Though he has no invoices to prove it, he claims that his late brother, Giuseppe, sold tiramisu to Le Beccherie, whose owners passed it off as their own.

Le Beccherie owner Carlo Campeol says that's preposterous. In a telephone interview, Campeol insisted that he's never met or even heard of Iannaccone or his restaurant Piedigrotta.

Stuck in the middle of a culinary he-says-he-says, I turned to Pietro Mascioni, the husband of a Los Angeles cooking teacher who became an amateur tiramisu-ologist after reading about Iannaccone's claim last year in foodie newsletter the Rosengarten Report ( http://www.davidrosengarten.com). The recipe printed in the newsletter directs you to first make a zabaglione, then a pastry cream, and it "seemed bogus," Mascioni said. "It's a chef's recipe. Wait two days for this, then make that. It's not something that you would do in Italy. Everything there is very simple and done on the spot." (Rosengarten, whose staff worked with Iannaccone to nail down the recipe, disagrees: "People want to believe that it's an old folk recipe that drifted into the kitchen. But what is clear is that tiramisu was invented by an Italian pastry chef, so it's likely it wouldn't be rustic.")

Mascioni began to search through his vast collection of Italian cookbooks and magazines. Finally, in a 1981 edition of "Vin Veneto," he found a series of recipes for coffee desserts collected by respected gourmet Giuseppe Maffioli. There, for the first time in print, was a recipe for tiramisu.

"Born recently, less than two decades ago, in the city of Treviso is a dessert called Tiramesu which was made for the first time in a restaurant, Alle Beccherie, by a pastry chef called Loly Linguanotto," the introduction, in Italian, declares loftily, using the Venetian dialect in the spelling of the dessert's name. "The dessert and its name, tiramesu, which signifies its nutritious and restorative properties, became immediately popular and was copied with fidelity and variations not only in the restaurants of Treviso and the region but throughout Veneto and Italy."

The recipe that follows, what Maffioli calls "tiramesu legittimo," combines eggs, sugar, mascarpone and coffee-soaked ladyfingers. There is no alcohol, because, as Campeol explained, it was served to children and the elderly.

A subsequent recipe for "refined" tiramisu includes rum or Marsala in the mix.

"The story is very credible," said Mascioni, who traveled to Treviso to talk to the Campeols last fall. There, matriarch Alba Campeol told Mascioni that she got the idea for the dessert after the birth of one of her children. She was very weak in bed and her mother-in-law brought her a zabaglione, spiked with coffee to give her energy.

When she returned to the restaurant, she worked with her chef, Liguanotto, to make a layered dessert that they called tiramesu. (Mascioni's account of his visit is at his wife's Web site: http://www.annamariavolpi.com.)