What to Eat in Italy: Typical Italian Food and Specialties | Page 4 of 6
Cannoli: Sicilian Pastry Tubes with Ricotta
Cannoli are crisp fried tubes filled with a cream of sheep's milk ricotta, the best-known sweet of Sicily. The name comes from the reed the dough was once wound around, the history from legends about a harem in Caltanissetta and from convent pastry shops. They are filled only just before they are sold, otherwise the shell goes soft - and that is exactly how you spot a good pastry shop.
I Segreti del Chiostro: A Convent Pastry Shop in Palermo
The only clue to the I Segreti del Chiostro pastry shop in Palermo is a sign outside the Santa Caterina convent. Inside, cannoli, cassata and the breasts of Saint Agatha are baked to the recipes of enclosed nuns - sweets that were sold for centuries through a revolving box in the wall. And the pastry comes with a cloister garden and a view from the convent roof.
Stigghiola di Vitello: Sicilian Grilled Veal Intestines
Stigghiola di vitello is thin veal intestine wound around a skewer and grilled over charcoal, street food from Palermo that today belongs to all of Sicily. Off the grill it gets cut into pieces, salted, finished with a squeeze of lemon and eaten with your hands, with nothing on the side. The name traces back to the Latin word for a little gut, the history to the "fifth quarter" - everything left at the slaughterhouse for the poor.
Stigghiola: Sicilian Grilled Lamb Intestines
Stigghiola is a Sicilian street food made from cleaned lamb or kid intestine, wound around a spring onion and parsley and grilled over charcoal. It's part of quinto quarto cooking, the fifth quarter, and it's grilled all over the island - in Messina it's called tajuni. It's served hot, with nothing but salt and lemon, most often in the evening at a stall you find by the smoke.
Vucciria Market: Where Palermo Stays Up Late
The Vucciria isn't the oldest or the biggest of Palermo's markets, but it's the only one that made it into a proverb and into an art gallery. Sleepy alleys with a handful of stalls and permanently wet flagstones by day; grills, smoke, music and crowds after dark. Why the proverb says the market's flagstones never dry, what Renato Guttuso has to do with it, and why I prefer Ballarò.
Cartocci Siciliani: Fried Yeast Tubes Filled with Ricotta
Cartocci siciliani are fried tubes of yeast dough, rolled in sugar and filled with sweetened ricotta studded with chocolate chips. They are cannoli's Palermo cousins, bought in the morning at a bar or a bakery to go with coffee, and in Palermo they also go by the name Macallè - after an Ethiopian town, though nobody knows why. Today you'll find them all over Sicily.
Cornetto: The Italian Answer to the Croissant
The cornetto is the Italian counterpart of the croissant: layered leavened dough shaped into a crescent, with eggs and sugar worked in, softer and sweeter than the French original and almost always filled with custard cream, chocolate, marmalade or pistachio cream. In northern Italy it's a brioche, on a shop shelf a croissant, at the counter a cornetto. You eat it in the morning with a cappuccino, and its family tree goes back to medieval Vienna, not to Paris.
Pardulas: Sardinian Ricotta Pastries
Pardulas are small Sardinian pastries of pinched dough, filled with sheep's milk ricotta flavored with saffron and citrus zest and baked golden. Originally an Easter sweet that children were given on All Souls', they are baked in Sardinia all year round today - and the name and the filling change with every part of the island: in some places they are filled with fresh cheese, in others raisins go in too. What they are named after is still anybody's guess.
Crostata: The Italian Lattice Tart
Crostata is an Italian tart of crumbly pastry with a layer of jam or custard and a lattice of pastry strips on top. At home it's baked on Sundays, in a bar it's served with coffee, and in a bakery you buy it by weight. It is named after the crust, not the filling, and it appears under that name in 15th-century Italian recipe books. Its closest relative is the Austrian Linzer Torte.
Pizzeria Cerere: A Family Pizzeria with Five Tables in Cagliari
A small family pizzeria in the center of Cagliari: five tables, he works the oven, she works the room, and a name borrowed from the Roman goddess of the harvest. Pizzeria Cerere stays open on Sundays and Mondays, when most of the city shuts, and alongside its twenty pizzas the menu keeps a Sardinian classic with pecorino and cured sausage. Plus an unfiltered Ichnusa from nearby Assemini.