Viagra in a pudding!

A pick-me-up for Italian ladies of the night? Or a dish born by mistake? As the ‘father’ of tiramisu dies, there’s one stimulating conclusion: it really is...

HERE’s a quick culinary starter for ten. Question: If you were feeling sluggish, lacking the necessary ‘oomph’, but still keen to hold your own in the bedroom department, which of the following could be relied on to perk you up in all the right places?

1. a platter of freshly shucked oysters and a glass of vintage champagne.

2. One small spoonful of honey with powdered ginseng.

3. several ripe figs.

4. a large portion of tiramisu, that rich, layered pudding of sponge fingers dipped in coffee and alcohol and served with whipped eggs, sugar, mascarpone cheese and cocoa.

And the answer is . . . all of them! Yes, each of these is widely thought to be an aphrodisiac: even tiramisu, which has a cholesterol count to set your heart into spasm.

Thanks to its alleged ‘perking’ qualities, this staple of Italian menus around the world has long been relied upon to add a certain ‘va va voom’ to proceedings when couples finally leave the table and venture upstairs.

In the bedrooms and brothels of its native Treviso, a few miles north of Venice, it is said to have been a handy pick-me-up for working girls in between demanding clients.

Even more scandalously, the madam (or Siora) would dish the dessert out to her satisfied male customers to ensure they had the energy to perform again at home without, er, arousing suspicion.

Did I mention that the literal translation of tiramisu is ‘lift me up’? The ‘lift’ is said to come from the crucial combination of egg yolk, sugar and caffeine. (The original did not contain alcohol.)

whatever the truth about the dish’s salacious origins, when the death was announced this week of the ‘father of tiramisu’, restaurateur ado Campeol, 93, the lusty residents of Treviso were plunged into deep mourning.

Even the governor of the local Veneto region, Luca Zaia, issued a public statement of distress.

as ado’s story goes —and, as we have seen, it is just one of several — it all started in 1969, in the kitchens of the now-famous Le Beccherie restaurant, which the family had run since 1939.

His wife, alba, was preparing a dish of ice cream in the kitchen with chef Roberto Linguanotto when, between them, they accidentally dropped a dollop of mascarpone cheese into a mixture of sugar and egg yolks already prepared for ice cream. Hey presto, it tasted sublime — and that was the beginning.

ALBa, however, also had her own version of events — occasionally repeated by their son, Carlo, who now runs the restaurant. In her story, the pudding dates back to 1955, when she was breastfeeding little Carlo, feasted on mascarpone mixed with sugar and biscuits soaked in coffee to keep her energy levels up, and later — again with Linguanotto — developed the world-famous dish.

Of course, not everyone is going to agree on the exact provenance of a pudding so famous.

according to the accademia del Tiramisu (whose role is described as ‘transmitting the culture of tiramisu’), the dessert is much older, created by a resourceful Treviso madam as a libido-booster — ‘a Viagra from the 19th century’ — for her grateful clients.

Others link it to sbatudin — an energetically beaten mix of egg yolks and sugar, favoured by Treviso farmers as a replenisher for athletic newlyweds.

More controversial, however, was the claim by Italian food writer and essayist Gigi Padovani and wife Clara — who spent two years researching tiramisu — that documents dating back to the 1950s suggest the dessert also existed in the neighbouring region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Naturally, officials from the

Veneto region went bananas. whoever invented it — chef or Siora — this was Treviso’s sexy pudding, not anyone else’s. They even host an annual Tiramisu world Cup for amateur chefs, with two main categories: ‘original recipe’ and ‘creative recipe’.

To be fair, whatever the provenance, most agree that Le Beccherie not only perfected it, but also did an extraordinary job in promoting it, over just a few decades, into Italy’s most famous and varied dessert. Because today there are more than 200 versions.

so in northern Italy the alcohol is amaretto; in the south, Marsala. Nigella Lawson uses Bailey’s, while fellow TV chef Giorgio Locatelli favours Grand Marnier but sometimes adds chopped bananas.

some chefs dunk the sponge fingers in coffee for seconds, others leave them until they’re dark and soggy. a few use the Italian fruit cake panettone. Oddly,

Jamie Oliver leaves out the eggs altogether. But the biggest no-no is the addition of cream. an act of such disrespect that makes tiramisu purists — of whom there are many — extremely agitated.

But not Linguanotto, the chef at Le Beccherie who may, or may not, have accidentally invented it. He just wanted everyone to enjoy its unexpected benefit.

‘Every country has their own taste,’ he once said. ‘as long as it lifts you up, it’s fine by me.’