Tiramisu

I don't remember the first time I ever ate tiramisu, but I know that whenever that was, I transcended. My fork had brought to my tongue the very essence of what heaven must be: a thing that cannot be described save that it is complete and utter joy.

I was born a lot closer to the equator than to tiramisu. And there's joy near the equator, too, for sure: fresh tortillas, refried beans, and plantains. But our foods are not delicate foods with subtle flavors. They are bold like the hot sun, the high mountains, and the wide desert. At a very young age, I learned how to slice plantains, how to mold tortilla dough in my hands, how to work a spoon around a frying pan to get the beans thick and heavy. In my country, we eat with our hands, licking our fingers, cleaning our plates with the last piece of a tortilla.

Tiramisu is not this kind of food. It is delicate, it is refined. It is a dessert served chilled in stemmed glassware, eaten with a tiny fork or spoon. It is the clinking of silver on glass and soft opera music filling the space between tables in fashionable restaurants. And so for me, tiramisu has always been enchanting and ethereal, something so other, a foil to my brashness and audacity.

It is this foreignness that makes tiramisu so transcendent, I suppose. It is the moment in which my body, my person, my self slows down and not with greedy hands in my bowl but with conservative little spoonfuls that I contemplate the joys of being. But this "joy" was always at the hands of someone other. My hands, so rehearsed in the Honduran kitchen, could not be the delicate hands that with gentle affection layer lady fingers and marscarpone cheese. Or so I believed, all these years since that first divine taste of glory.

But I have found, at last, the truest Epicurean joy, not in eating tiramisu, but in making it. My body, my person, my self slows down with whisk and egg whites, lady fingers dipped one by one in chilled coffee, cocoa powder carefully dusted over those dainty layers. In its subtle persistence, Tiramisu, I have discovered, is bold in its own right.