Cannoli: Sicilian Pastry Tubes with Ricotta
I have one rule when I travel around Italy: no more than one cannolo a day. Not out of discipline, but out of physics - one is enough to finish you off, and the second you'd just be forcing down. Even at that pace I have put away more of them over the years than is decent, and most of them I don't remember. But one place with superb cannoli has stuck with me.
Cannoli are crisp fried tubes of thin dough filled with a sweet cream of sheep's milk ricotta - the best-known sweet of Sicily and the dessert Italy most likes to show off to the world: the ends rolled in pistachios or candied orange peel, powdered sugar on top.
What Cannolo Means and How It Changes Across the Island
The name is humbler than the reputation. Canna is Italian for reed or tube, so cannolo is a "little tube" - after the piece of river reed the dough used to be wound around before frying, until metal forms took over. The singular is cannolo, the plural cannoli; order "one cannoli" in Palermo and you'll still get it, just with an extra smile. Cannoli are made all over Sicily, not in one city, and the island varies them from place to place: the west finishes the ends with candied orange, the east around Catania with pistachios, and Dattilo near Trapani makes its ricotta coarser and less sweet, which has earned it a reputation for the best cannolo on the island. If you'd rather not pick a side, ask for both orange and pistachios. The American cannoli in The Godfather are filled with cow's milk ricotta and sweetened up with extra sugar - and the line "Leave the gun, take the cannoli" was improvised on set, just like that filling.
Cicero, a Harem and Nuns
The history of cannoli is a string of lovely claims, almost none of which holds up. The oldest "evidence", a Latin line about a tube of flour filled with the sweetest milk dish, is credited to Cicero from his time in office in Sicily; the oldest source anyone can actually trace that sentence to is a 1954 book by a Sicilian duke and gourmet, which makes the ancient pedigree of cannoli a few years younger than television. Then comes the legend: Caltanissetta was Qal'at al-Nissa in Arabic, "castle of the women", and in the harem of the local emir the concubines are said to have fried tubes whose shape was a tribute to the master of the house. After the Normans came, the women from the dissolved harems are supposed to have taken refuge in convents, recipes and all - and convent pastry shops really did keep cannoli going for centuries. All that is certain is that the Arab period brought cane sugar to the island along with the habit of mixing it into ricotta, and that cannoli were for a long time a Carnival sweet, a burst of plenty before the fast, until year-round tourism turned them into an everyday one.
How Cannoli Are Filled and Why It Matters
The shell, scorza in Italian, comes from a dough of flour, lard, wine vinegar and a little Marsala. It is rolled out paper thin, wrapped around a metal form and fried in lard; the vinegar and wine raise tiny blisters on the surface, and those tell the pastry chef that nobody cut corners with the dough. Cannoli look like the cream horns we buy at the bakery back home, only the family tree is different and there is cheese inside instead of air. The ricotta has to be sheep's milk and it has to go through a sieve - only once it is pushed through does it turn as smooth as cream and stop clumping in your mouth; it takes less sugar than anyone with a sweet tooth back home would expect, because the sweetness is meant to come from the candied fruit and the chocolate chips.
They are eaten with your hands and right away. The moisture in the ricotta starts softening the shell within about half an hour, which is why a proper pastry shop fills your cannolo in front of you - the empty tubes in the basket behind the counter aren't a sign they've run out, they're a guarantee. A ready-filled cannolo from a chilled case next to the souvenirs is the surest way to end up with a sad one.
One Cannolo Behind a Convent Wall
The cannolo I do remember, I ate in Palermo, at the convent pastry shop I Segreti del Chiostro (see Where to Eat in Palermo), which bakes to the recipes of the cloistered nuns of the Santa Caterina convent, a short walk from city hall. They filled my cannolo while I waited. The shell cracked and shattered at the first bite, the ricotta was cold and noticeably less sweet than pastry shops usually make it, and the candied orange peel and pistachios were doing more work than they usually do in a dessert - the cream tasted of milk, not of sugar. It cost 3 EUR. I stuck to the one-a-day rule, but ever since that day it has had a side effect: I measure every other cannolo in Italy against that one, and very few have matched it.
