I was recently on a quite boring tour of the northern Italian city of Treviso when the guide said an astonishing thing that woke me from my slumber.
“Treviso was once dubbed ‘the city of sex’. Few people know that tiramisú was born inside local brothels to refuel clients, to keep the sex and money flowing,” said Paolo, the guide.
We were passing an abandoned, very ornate building that had served as a “house of ill repute” until the end of the 1950s, when the government shut all brothels nationwide.
“This used to be Treviso’s largest sex house. Men of all ages and social classes would gather here: bourgeois, nobles, artisans, notaries. Tiramisú was their treat, it was a very ‘democratic’ cake back then.”
My curiosity was piqued. As we made our way across tiny stone bridges, watermills covered in vegetation, alleys and old-fashioned frescoed aristocratic palazzos, I put a few questions to Paolo.
The revelation that Italy’s most iconic dessert, known and loved worldwide, started off as a cat house sex booster was simply flabbergasting.
Tiramisú was a sort of natural viagra. But then I suppose the word itself means “lift me up”, which has certain connotations.
“While it evolved across time as a recipe, at first brothel runners would serve it as a simple cup of fresh egg yolks mixed with sugar until it became a dense paste. It was dubbed ‘sbattutin’ in local Treviso dialect, which has a more profound sexual connotation meaning ‘bang me’,” Paolo informed the crowd.
Cups of sbattutin were regularly prepared and served to give energy to clients, and so keep the money and business going. The more sbattutin, the more the brothel flourished. It seems this ancestor of tiramisú had probably been around since at least the Renaissance.
This story made me think of my granny, who grew up in a farmhouse in the north and who used to give me a cup of uovo sbattuto, egg yolks, for breakfast. And it certainly gave me an energy boost, so much so that I couldn’t sleep at night.
Today, no mother has the time to whisk the ingredients together any more – you need a strong wrist that doesn’t tire easily. For the eggs and sugar to blend well, it takes at least 10 to 15 minutes.
Finally I asked Paolo, how did sbattutin eventually turn into tiramisú as we know it today?
He threw his head back and laughed. “Well, that’s why we need to thank the government for shutting down brothels and making prostitution illegal. The cake survived, it made its way to the outside world.”
What he really meant by this was that one or more regular brothel clients loved sbattutin so much that they took it from the bordello out into everyday life.
“It is likely that a few husbands brought the basic recipe home and told their oblivious wives to hone it with more ingredients, like adding coffee and ladyfingers. Or perhaps it was tavern runners and pastry chefs who did this, thus spreading the modern version of tiramisú”, Paolo concluded.
As I strolled past yet another former brothel now turned into a cosy pub on the river banks, I thought what a pity that these brothels are no longer around to serve the original sbattutin.
OK, maybe not. But it was interesting to know that one of our most famous dishes began life as a kinky cake.
Silvia Marchetti is a freelance reporter living in Rome
