The secret history of cannoli

For Italian American families, there’s only one dessert that really matters – the cannolo. Its origins lie in Sicily’s Carnival celebrations, but cannoli have grown strong roots among southern Italy’s diaspora population in the US.

When I was growing up in New England, this most auspicious of pastries was there at every family event – every kid’s birthday, every wedding, every special dinner. Getting married? Order the cannoli. Baby on the way? Cannoli. New house? New job? Cannoli.

That legendary line from ‘The Godfather’, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli”, was shocking. But to leave the cannoli behind would have been unthinkable.

Cannoli were as inevitable as life and death – and when you passed to the other side, you could rest assured that there would be cannoli. Loved ones would console one another, scattering shards of pastry shell and icing sugar over the funeral home’s carpeted floor as they exaggerated the virtues of the recently deceased. It’s the only time that a cannolo would taste bittersweet.

Cannoli are essential to the sugar-rush Carnival celebrations that mark the beginning of Lent, and its raw ingredients – wheat flour, ricotta, candied citrus, honey or sugar and a touch of wine – are emblematic of the island. Sicily was under Arab rule from the 9th to the 11th centuries, and it was the Arabs who brought sugarcane and citrus cultivation, as well as the pistachios, almonds and the aromatic spices that define many Sicilian sweets.

Sugar cultivation was transformative, in Sicily and beyond. The Arabs “revolutionised the whole of European confectionery by introducing into Sicily the cultivation of sugarcane,” writes Mary Taylor Simeti in Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-five centuries of Sicilian food (1989). “[They] opened the door to all the possibilities and peccadilloes of European patisserie and introduced Sicily to the Oriental taste for the overpoweringly sweet.”

Sicily has the honour of being the cradle of European patisserie, and travelling here to taste a proper cannolo on its home turf is worth crossing the Med for. That’s what I did on a trip to Sicily last year.

It should come as no surprise that Sicilians have Strong Opinions about cannoli. My guide, Marina, didn’t pull her punches. “The best cannoli are from Palermo – and that is spoken by a Palermitan”, she says in a way that brooks no debate. Her calm urbanity seems prone to puncture at the merest thought of a cannolo being made The Wrong Way. “In Catania, they don’t know how to make cannoli. In Taormina, they know nothing about cannoli. Cannoli made with pistachio cream? That’s not cannoli,” she says with a dismissive wave of the hand.

“There are many ways to make cannoli,” she concedes, but there are Rules. The pastry shell must be fried in lard or olive oil until crisp and browned. The ricotta must be made from local sheep’s milk. A bit of alcohol is permitted in the dough to help it bubble up and turn crunchy. And it absolutely must not be filled in advance, which would make that crunchy shell turn flaccid. A few pieces of candied orange, a dusting of icing sugar and perhaps a glacé cherry is all the embellishment a cannolo requires.

“What about chocolate?” I ask, hoping not to stoke her ire. “Ah, that is traditional,” she says (Sicily was under Spanish dominion from the 16th century, and the Spanish brought chocolate from the Aztec civilisation in South America). So chocolate chips in the ricotta filling are very much allowed – but lining the shell with chocolate to retain its crispness is frowned upon.

Marina then told me something that surprised me. She explained that the absolute best cannoli are made in a place called Piana degli Albanesi, midway between the city of Palermo on the coast and the town of Corleone (that ‘Godfather’ theme again). This is the home of the Sicilian Arbëreschë community, who came here from Albania as refugees in the late 1400s, and who maintain their own language and cultural traditions. And who make the best cannoli, to which the town is something of a living shrine.

I wasn’t able to make the trip to Piana degli Albanesi (something for my next visit) but I was able to taste a freshly fried, freshly filled cannolo made by maestro pasticcere Giorgio Clesceri. My palate was weaned on the over-embellished, hyper-sweet, more-is-more approach of American cannoli, so this elegant, refined version, with its creamy-sharp ricotta and a shell so crisp it shattered, came as a delicious surprise.

Serve these at my funeral and I’ll go out happy.