The Next Tiramisu
1.
There are at least 2 million Italians alive today who spent the entirety of their childhoods and young adult lives without tasting tiramisu. Given that tiramisu is the world’s greatest Italian dessert and you would have to be a little crazy to avoid trying it even once, this is odd.
Why did these Italians grow up without tiramisu? Surely the necessary ingredients existed? (They did.) Surely at least some of these Italians would have been able to afford them? (They would have.) Surely there were restaurants in Italy serving dessert? (There were.) So why?
The answer is that tiramisu was probably invented around the 1960s, and as of 2024 there were ~2.4 million Italians over the age of 85. These Italians were not able to form childhood memories of chocolatey creamy coffee bliss was because tiramisu simply did not exist. The ingredients for making tiramisu existed. Pastry chefs existed. Home cooks existed. Kitchens and kitchen tools existed. Many Italians existed who could have made tiramisu, but didn’t. Until the ‘60s.
I hope every single one of those old Italians has had the chance to try tiramisu.
More than that, I wonder: what is the next tiramisu?
2.
My teachers in school always talked about history as this far away thing; a series of Great Events orchestrated by Great Men who have statues and paintings in a stuffy London museum. I got the impression that most of the history was already made, and that even if I wanted to make history, well, I would have to first become a Great Man (or Woman) to do so.
Then there is tiramisu, whose origins are contested but was likely invented by a pretty ordinary person in a pretty ordinary place. And now millions or perhaps billions of people on the planet could not imagine a life without tiramisu. Some of them, like myself until recently, imagine tiramisu has been there forever.
Lots of things are like this, so obvious and so simple that we imagine they must have existed since the beginning of time—only they haven’t. Things like:
- The doorknob, which was only invented in 1878.
- The grocery store, which was invented in 1916.
- The upright wheeled suitcase, which was invented 73 years after the first commercial flight.
- The fortune cookie, invented in the 1900s (and in California, not China).
- The croissant, invented in the 1800s and which was actually brought over from Austria.
- The Saturday and Sunday weekend as a break from work, which is quite recent!
Of course, there is also the wheel. “Humans have been ‘behaviorally modern’ for about 50 thousand years,” Katja Grace writes on her blog as she wonders about this topic. Why the hell, then, did it take us until 4000BC, nearly 44,000 years, to invent the wheel?
This Scientific American essay says it is not the wheel that was so hard, but the axle. “The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept,” they quote an anthropology professor as saying. Hmmm. Really? The wheel was easy, but it was the axle that took 44,000 years to get right?
I call bullshit.
Or, at least, I think we are making too many excuses for the ancient humans. Remember, we are the ones who took more than one thousand years after the invention of coffee (and many hundreds of years after the invention of mascarpone) to invent tiramisu. It could be that the wheel was truly impossible to invent until 4000BC… Or it could be that this was yet another tiramisu situation.
3.
Inventions are weird things. Things that do not occupy space in your mind or mine will seem so obvious in retrospect, once they are created. And yes, if you want to, you can point to the million different things that topple into each other like dominoes in order for that single spark of brilliance to occur. You could argue that good inventions must follow Hemingway’s process for going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.
But I also think it is dangerous to view history in this way. To imagine that you could not be the one to make it. You don’t need to be a special person to invent the next tiramisu. You don’t need to (consciously, at least) rely on a thousand different things that came before you. You can just wake up, pick up the tools you have, and do it.
It is tempting to view the world as a piece of ceramic that has been molded by Great Men and Women Who Came Before, then fired in a kiln and left for us to dance aimlessly in. It would be more accurate to say that the world is being molded again and again every second, each time a little differently, each time with a little more detail. One version does not have tiramisu, and then another version does. One version does not have a suitcase with wheels, and the next version does. The tools to etch new detail into that ceramic are available to everyone, including you. If you can, I think you should use them. [0]
* * *
[0] This applies to art in a big way. No, all the novels have not been written, not all the indie horror video games have been made. You can go out and make something beautiful. No excuses!
Enjoy these essays?
Or, if you have any feedback, contact us.