Traditional Tiramisu Requires A Specific Kind Of Ladyfingers

While tiramisu is a popular product flavor, popping up in everything from chocolate truffles to ice cream to coffee pods, the actual dessert itself is a fairly simple one. While some stories date the recipe back to the 19th century (one particularly colorful version relates that it was birthed in a brothel), others credit it to a 20th-century restaurateur named Ado Campeol who added it to the menu of his restaurant in the Italian city of Treviso in 1972. Campeol's tiramisu recipe called for coffee-soaked ladyfingers with a filling of sweetened whipped mascarpone and a sprinkling of cocoa powder, although latterday chefs have been known to booze up the dessert with marsala or rum.

The first known recipe for the tiramisu served at Campeol's "Le Beccherie" was published in a 1981 issue of a magazine called "Vin Veneto." It calls for savoiardi cookies and by some accounts, this word is simply the Italian name for ladyfingers. In fact, there are packages of these cookies that use both terms on the label. Some cooks, however, seem to feel that savoiardi and ladyfingers are two different things. This difference, though, would seem to depend entirely on the type of ladyfingers you buy or bake (by the way, here's a ladyfinger recipe if you want one). If the cookies are soft and spongy, they may not be quite right for traditional tiramisu, but drier, harder versions are in the savoiardi style and thus will work just fine.

Just because tiramisu is considered to be a dessert classic, that doesn't mean that the recipe is etched in stone, and any alterations will condemn you to an eternity in culinary purgatory. Some cooks like to make tiramisu with digestive biscuits, which are admittedly better known in the U.K. than the U.S. Marie (or Maria) cookies, however, are fairly similar, and graham crackers, too, can be used in place of digestives. In fact, there are tiramisu recipes that specifically call for graham crackers as a less-sweet alternative to ladyfingers.

Cake, too, makes a great ladyfinger alternative in tiramisu recipes. You can either take something like a pound cake and cut it into strips to use in the same way you'd use the cookies or else you can sandwich the mascarpone cream filling between layers of yellow cake. (Or even chocolate cake, since we're already off the beaten path here.) Perhaps one of the most out-of-the-box (or cookie jar) spins on a traditional tiramisu we've seen, however, involves swapping out the savoiardi for Twinkies. Tiramisu purists may frown upon such heresy, but the way we see it, Twinkies are kind of like spongy ladyfingers with extra cream filling, so there's no reason why it wouldn't work.