Roberto Linguanotto, accidental creator of tiramisu

Happy accidents are as important to discovery in cooking as to any other branch of science. For every Alexander Fleming and a neglected petri dish, there is a Roberto Linguanotto and a licked spoon. Without the former we would not have penicillin; without the latter the world would have been deprived of tiramisu.
One Wednesday afternoon in January 1970, Linguanotto recalled, he was working as a pastry chef in the kitchens of Le Beccherie, a noted restaurant in the centre of Treviso. Before returning to his native Italy, he had worked as a cook in Germany and had been influenced by its Habsburg-style desserts and trifles.
He also specialised in making gelato. That day, he had to prepare vanilla ices with strawberries for a formal occasion. While waiting for the milk to boil, he separated the eggs and mixed them with sugar. Feeling peckish, he opened the fridge, wherein there was some mascarpone, a soft cheese. He scooped up a spoonful from its packet but while he was tasting it some fell into the mixing bowl. As Linguanotto lifted it out, he ate it and realised that the happenstance combination of ingredients was delicious. The cheese was fatty, and to balance it he thought of adding a more stringent flavour, that of coffee.
The restaurant was owned and run by a couple, Ado and Alba Campeol. With the latter, he layered the mixture, sprinkled with cocoa powder, over some sponge fingers, known in Italy as savoiardi. Both Linguanotto and Alba were familiar with the egg-and-sugar blend that topped these, known locally as sbatudin — “beaten” — since country folk would give it to their children before school. Alba had used it as a tonic while breastfeeding her own offspring. The people of the Veneto region said in their dialect that it “pulls one up”, or tiramesù.
Thanks to the renown of Le Beccherie, the popularity of the new dish quickly spread, not least to much-visited Venice, and in 1981 it received its first mention in a cookery book by the gastronome Giuseppe Maffioli. He telephoned Linguanotto to get the recipe. The latter had by then struck out on his own, but while at Le Beccherie, conscious of his junior status, grateful to his employers and aware that the Trevigiani disliked tall poppies, had not striven to get the credit for his creativity.
As with caesar salad, said to have been the product of a shortage of supplies during a Fourth of July holiday, different versions of tiramisu’s origins spread. A form of it was said to have been served by a chef from Friuli aboard Italy’s royal yacht in 1938 during a cruise off Syracuse. More wildly, there were claims it had been devised for the clients of a fashionable brothel in Treviso to restore its clients’ powers so that on returning home they would not fail in their conjugal duties.
Although nothing resembling tiramisu appears in Pellegrino Artusi’s canonical catalogue of Italian cooking at the end of the 19th century, similar dishes may have existed even in Renaissance times. Yet before the invention of refrigeration they would have lacked at least one defining ingredient, mascarpone, which would have been unsafe to eat almost as soon as it had left its native Lombardy.
The most plausible rival to Linguanotto’s concoction was a dessert, probably with Austro-Hungarian roots, known as coppa imperiale. This was said to have been served at another establishment in Treviso in the 1950s, or at one in the neighbouring region of Friuli, close to the border with Slovenia.
In 2013, the president of the Veneto region, Luca Zaia, prevailed on the EU to certify tiramisu as having a local origin status akin to the prosciutto and parmesan of Emilia. Four years later, to Venetian fury, Friuli struck back when Italy’s ministry of agriculture, food and forestry policies included it in a list of the region’s traditional foods.
These rivalries, however, were of less concern to the wider world. By 1993, tiramisu’s appeal had spread as far as the Pacific Northwest. Playing on its reputation as an aphrodisiac, Nora Ephron’s script for Sleepless in Seattle has Tom Hanks’s character, a widower dating for the first time in 15 years, baffled by a friend’s mention of tiramisu.
“What is it?” he asks. “Some woman is going to want me to do it to her and I’m not going to know what it is.” “You’ll love it,” the friend assures him. Certainly, restaurant-goers everywhere soon seemed to. There is now a tiramisu world cup for chefs of different nations and a Guinness world record for the largest tiramisu (30m x 2m). The five most recognised Italian words globally are said to be pizza, spaghetti, espresso, mozzarella and tiramisu.
Roberto Linguanotto was born in Treviso in 1943. His family worked as waiters and baristi in the hostelries and restaurants grouped about the city’s main piazza, and by the age of 12 he was already employed as a bottlewasher and server at wedding feasts. He worked at Le Beccherie from about 1968 until 1973 when, glad of the chance to escape the confines of Treviso, he took up the chance to buy a gelateria in Mestre, across the water from Venice. The opportunity came through his brother-in-law. Linguanotto was married to Anna Maria, with whom he had Fabio, who has a food business of his own, Massimo, who works in investment, Monica and Roberta.
Linguanotto, who had a sweet tooth, was at his happiest making gelato. He was shy but hardworking, if generous to a fault, often including more of the best ingredients in his gelato than perhaps the price warranted. After a decade in Mestre, he returned to Treviso to open a parlour there, eschewing the fashion for new flavours in favour of classic tastes, which also contained less sugar.
For two decades from the mid-1980s, he worked as a technical adviser to Italian ice-cream manufacturers, including Pernigotti, who were looking to expand their operations. Linguanotto knew the central European market well and travelled as far as China to teach apprentices there how to make gelato.
“Loli”, as he was known, suffered from heart trouble in later years, and then from a cancer that, much to his distress, confined him to a diet that deprived him of many things that he liked to eat. It was not much of an existence, he told his family.
At his funeral, the presiding priest, Don Stefano Tempesta, told the mourners that throughout his life Linguanotto had balanced the three things that were important to him: his work, his relationships with others and his faith. Might not an apt metaphor for that, said Don Stefano, be tiramisu?
Roberto Linguanotto, pastry chef, was born on November 7, 1943. He died of cancer of the jaw on July 28, 2024, aged 80