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The fourteenth step of our worldwide tour is dedicated to Cannoli Siciliani, the most luscious of Sicilian sweets, a masterpiece of Italian Pasticceria. Rich, sweet, crispy and sublime, “each cannolo is a King’s sceptre,” says a popular poem. This worldwide famous and unmistakable dolce is unfortunately often counterfeited. A recipe of authentic Cannoli Siciliani is presented above in a video by Francesco Elmi.

La Vita è dolce arrives in the capital of tango four its Step nº 14. The protagonists are Cannoli Siciliani and Donato De Santis, who will serve the Sicilian specialty in his Bruni Restaurant and in his Da Donato Cucina Pardiso. For La Vita è Dolce Donato composed a kind of pastry poem, in which authentic cannoli siciliani finished with special Bronte’s pistachios are the centrepiece, and they are surrounded by a minimalist decoration of sesame croccante, with precious pricly pears (Fichi d’India), honey, candied oranges and a custard of the same pistachios of Bronte.

Donato de Santis is a talented Italian Chef and a GVCI Board Member. He was Gianni Versace's Personal Chef for over six years. Previously he had had extensive work experiences both in Italy (Osteria del Teatro, Piacenza) and in the U.S., where he cooked in some of the finest Italian restaurants, including Valentino in Santa Monica (California) and Bice (Palm Beach, Coconut Grove FL, and Chicago IL).

Donato de Santis' Trinacria di Cannoli

Currently Donato is one of the stars of the South American Food Channel El Gourmet and co-owns Bruni Restaurant in Buenos Aires. Donato is a resolute educator, in his exquisite gastro-atelier (Da Donato Cucina Paradiso) he runs classes and workshops for food enthusiasts who want to learn the authentic Italian Cuisine.
Donato calls his composition of Cannoli: Trinacria, the ancient Greek name of Sicily, which means 3 promontories (Peloro, Lilibeo and Pachino, today famous for its succulent tomatoes).

Sicilian flag

The dish is a tribute to Sicily and contains some of the most iconic ingredients of the island: pistachios, oranges and prickly pears, their trees are the emblem and the essence of the Sicilian landscapes.

The presence of sesame evokes the strong influence that Arabs had on the life and culture of Sicily, from which most likely the cannoli, as a sweet, were born out. Donato’s effort is even more valuable because the ingredients he used in the dish come from Italy and, despite the strong cultural relations Italy has with Argentina these, are not easy to find in Buenos Aires. One curiosity: Donato invented a neologism (scivolata) to explain how the custard of Bronte pistachios were “slided” in the dish. Bronte, a town in the province of Catania, is known as the Italian Capital of pistachio.

Bronte's pistachio

Prickly Pears

Salvo Caramagno´s painting with Oranges

“Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, words of Pete Clemenza in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola 1972) that by now are a cult, a part of the history of the most luscious Sicilian sweets, a masterpiece of Italian pasticceria. Cannoli, the delicious dolce that consists of a fried, rolled, crumbly crust (scorza, crosta o buccia), traditionally obtained by rolling the dough around a tube, frying it in pork lard and filling it with sheep ricotta cheese, candied fruits and chocolate drops, was quite a protagonist of that hugely successful movie.
In the third part of the same saga, Ozzie Altobello, another don, is a victim of his fondness for cannoli siciliani: he dies, while watching the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, after eating some that had been poisoned by his goddaughter (Connie Corleone).

The famous scene of The Godfather

A hundred years before the movie, in Italy, it would have been rather improbable that it could happen. Firstly, because no one ever ate cannoli at the opera house and, secondly, because they were feasted upon only during Carnival, a period running from January 17th untill 40 days before Easter (Mardi Gras). However, in the recent decades though, cannoli have been consumed all year round.

“Beautiful Carnival Cannoli, there is no better morsel in the world,” (“Beddi cannuola di Carnivali, megghiu vuccuni a lu munnu un ci nn’è,”) states a vernacular 19th century Sicilian poem. It continues with: “Cui nun ni mancia, si fazza ammazzari, Cui li disprezza è un gran cornuto affè.” In other words: “Those who don’t eat them deserve to go to the hell, those who despise them are cuckolds.”

Made originally throughout Sicily, the beautiful southern Italian region-island, cannoli are now usualy found in the rest of Italy too. In Palermo they are finished with candied cherries or oranges on both sides, while in other parts of Sicily some pistachio powder is added.

You can tell if a cannolo is good when it has a fresh crumbly crust with its peculiar blisters, which are obtained by adding some alcohol – Marsala, white wine or even Vermouth – to the dough. Cannoli must be filled with the ricotta mix shortly before consumption. The contrast of texture plays an important role in its correct appreciation, as well as the original ingredients. Cannoli filled with cream, mascarpone cheese, or even custard – common usages in the US – are not cannoli, that is, they have nothing to do with the authentic tradition.

Where the name ‘cannoli’ comes from? There are various not proven answers; the most reliable one relates the word ‘cannolo’ to ‘canna’ (cane), since in the old times the dough was rolled around a piece of cane and not a metallic tube, as they are now, and then fried. When was the first cannolo made? While cassata alla siciliana, the other famous sweet born on the Southern Italian Island, has an inventor and a date of birth, there is no historic evidence of the origin of cannoli. In the 1st century bC, the Roman writer Marcus Tullius Cicero mentions a ‘tubus farinarius’ (a pipe made with flour), made with milk and of a very sweet taste that he ate in Sicily while he was a Roman Commissioner there.

That ‘tubus’ could possibly be the ancestor of the sweet we have today, though in those times there were neither sugar nor candied fruit. In reality, cannoli may well be among those foods of pastoral origins made with honey (as traditional cassata al forno) that changed when the Arabs arrived in Sicily and introduced sugar cane in the 10th century. Various authors agree on the Arabic roots of cannoli, as for instance Alberto Denti di Pirajno who, in his book Siciliani a tavola (Sicilians to the Table), wrote: “The cannolo is not a Christian sweet, because the variety of flavours and the exuberance of the composition betray a clear Islamic origin.” Apparently, the Arab forerunner of the cannolo, was a sweet that had the shape of a banana filled with almonds and sugar. According to Denti di Pirajno, cannoli were created by nuns in a Convent in Caltanissetta, another town of the Region of Sicily; when the Arabs were vanquished by the Normans in the 11th century. There are very creative conjectures on what could have happened: these nuns could have possibly been former concubines of Arab lords, who prepared these sweets in the harems. When their Lords had to leave they converted to Catholicism, became nuns, and took their recipes with them to the convents. It’s not likely that history actually took this course and even if it did, those cannoli were not like the ones we know today.

Sicilian candied fruits

Candied fruit, a preservation technique and another legacy of the Arabs, became rather commonly used only in the 16th century. So, it’s improbable that candied orange, pumpkin (zuccata or cucuzzata in Sicilian) or cherries, were part of either the filling or the decoration before that time. Nor was chocolate scantly known in Italy before the 18th century. In any case cannoli (still made in some Convents today) were highly sought-after, with or without these ingredients.

“Each cannolo is a king’s sceptre,” says the already mentioned popular poem, which reminds us of another attribute of the sweet: “The cannolo is Moses’ stick.” (“Lu cannolo è la virga di Moisè.”) There is a plain double meaning in the expression; as the Sicilian author Giuseppe Coria makes clear in his studies, the cannolo clearly represents a phallic shape. In this sense, it has been compared to the steles and menhirs of the Druids, both symbols of fertility. It’s useful to remember here that Italian Carnival, the period in which cannoli were eaten, was full of phallic allusions. As a symbol of fertility the cannolo was seen as a kind of protection against evil spirits.

Cannoli are given to friends and relatives as gifts by the dozen or multiples thereof. There is no universal size for cannoli, they can be very small as the cannolicchi of Piana degli Albanesi, where every year a Sagra del Cannolo is organized during Carnival. The longest cannolo ever made, 4,03 metres, was presented at the Sagra of 2003. Piana degli Albanesi belongs to a group of 42 towns, in the areas of Alto Belice, Valle del Torto and Valle dei Feudi,  led by the University of Messina, that are working on obtaining the DOC, the denomination of protected origin, for Sicilian cannoli made in the traditional way.

Rosario Scarpato

Cannolo is an Italian dolce of Sicilian origins. It's a symbol of both Sicily and Italian pasticceria, everywhere. Here, the authentic recipe prepared by pastry chef Francesco Elmi.

Ingredients
For the crust (buccia or scorza)

Photo 1		Flour 00	250 gr
		Lard (or butter)	20 gr
		Eggs	100 gr
		Sugar	20 gr
		Vermouth, white	60 gr
		Lemon peel, grated	1
		Cinnamon	1 teaspoon
		(Photo 1)

Procedure

Knead all the ingredients with the Planetaria mixer (photos 2 & 3), at moderate speed for approximately 20 minutes, until a stiff, homogeneous dough is obtained.
Remove the dough from the mixer and finish kneading by hand to smoothen it (photo 4), then wrap it in film (photo 5).
Let it rest in the refrigerator for at least one hour.
Roll out the dough until it is one to two millimetres thick (photo 6), cut into disks (photo 7), wet the edges with water; give it a tube shape around a pipe (photo 8), fry in seed oil at 180° C (photo 9).
Let cool on absorbent paper.
Yields 50 four-centimetre-long cannoli.

Photo 2	Photo 3	Photo 6 Photo 9
Photo 4	Photo 5
Photo 7	Photo 8

Ingredients
For the ricotta filling

Photo 1		Ricotta, sheep’s milk	500 gr
		Candied orange peel	160 gr
		Essence of orange blossom	40 gr
		Sugar, granulated	150 gr
		Chocolate (tempered)	120 gr
		(Photo 10)

Procedure

Sieve the ricotta (photo 11), add the sugar, the orange peel and the essence of orange blossom (photo 12).
Brush the inside of the crust with the tempered chocolate (photo 13), fill it with the ricotta mixture (photo 14) and dust with confectionary sugar and cinnamon.
Garnish with orange peel and candied cherries (photo 15).

	Photo 11		Photo 12
	Photo 13		Photo 14
Photo 15

Recipes Editor and La Vita è Dolce Worldwide Tour Coordinator: Elena Ruocco.