Cannoli

Sicilian cannoli are pastries made by filling fried, tube-shaped shells with sweetened ricotta just before they are eaten. A single pastry is called a cannolo, and more than one are called cannoli.

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” in The Godfather

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” Clemenza speaks this line in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). The film tells the story of a family with roots in Sicily, but this scene is set in the United States.

As Clemenza heads out, his wife asks him not to forget to buy some cannoli. Later, Clemenza drives Paulie out, and Rocco, the gunman assigned to the job, shoots him dead. As they walk away from the car, Clemenza speaks these two short sentences to Rocco, telling him to leave the gun behind and take the pastries. The wife’s request from the beginning of the scene has not been forgotten, even after the killing.

The scene sets sweet pastries brought home against the job of killing a man. That contrast makes the line hard to forget. The husband who does the shopping his wife asked for and the man who directs a killing are the same person. In the brief exchange over retrieving the box of cannoli, we see a man in whom home life and criminal violence calmly coexist. ACMI, a museum of the moving image, also reads the scene as black humor built on the contrast between violence and domestic food.

According to the American Film Institute, the second half of the line, “Take the cannoli,” was an ad-lib added by Richard Castellano, who played Clemenza. The wife’s earlier request became a line that takes on meaning at the end of the scene. Accounts differ on the details of how the wife’s line came about.

In the film, cannoli are a family food and, at the same time, a prop that leaves a strong impression in a scene of violence.

Ingredients from across Sicily and the festival seasons

Along with cassata, cannoli are one of the pastries that symbolize Sicily. They were originally associated with Carnival and were eaten in farming and herding households and at festive tables. Even today, when they are sold year-round, they remain connected to local dairy products, festivals, and a way of life in which sweets are shared.

In the area around Trapani, a version has been handed down in which a shell made of flour, water, Marsala, and lard is filled with sheep’s milk ricotta, sugar, and vanilla. Records state that farming and herding households ate them at Carnival and Easter, and that they also appeared in pastry shops to coincide with the ricotta production season.

The cannoli that artisans are working to revive in Piana degli Albanesi and Santa Cristina Gela use stone-ground flour from Maiorca, a Sicilian soft wheat, and honey instead of sugar. The shells, made with wine and lard, are filled with drained, sieved sheep’s milk ricotta mixed with honey, and pieces of chocolate are added just before filling. In this area, the traditional pastry is being re-created with care given not only to its size but also to the wheat and honey used.

Records from this area also indicate that cannoli were on the Easter and Christmas tables of residents of Albanian-language heritage, and that they later came to be widely eaten except during the hot summer. Today they are sold throughout the year, but they were originally a pastry tied to the seasons of ricotta production and religious festivals.

Wrapping dough around a core and frying it into a tube

This Sicilian pastry is made by preparing the dry shell and the moist filling separately and combining them at the end. The shell dough is wrapped around a reed or metal core to create a hollow, and the cream is made smooth after the whey is drained off. Preparing the two separately keeps the shell lightly crisp at the first bite.

The name comes from canna, meaning a reed or tube. Originally, the dough was wrapped around a piece of reed to form a tube, and the core was removed after frying. With today’s metal forms, the principle is the same: the shell sets around a core, leaving a hollow center.

The shell is made with ingredients such as wheat flour, lard, and wine or water, and some recipes (the proportions of ingredients and the method) also add egg, sugar, and cocoa. Cocoa is not essential; a small amount also serves to give the shell a darker color. The dough is kneaded until firm and cohesive, rested, and rolled out thin. It can be rolled from circles, ovals, or diamond shapes, and the short edges are overlapped to close it; one method uses egg white to seal it.

When the tubes are placed in hot lard or oil, the dough around them fries into a shell. The key points are to secure the overlap so that it does not open, and, after frying, to drain off the oil and remove the form inside without breaking the shell. Unlike a tube of baked laminated pastry, the shell is made by frying a single thin sheet of dough, which produces small bubbles and an uneven surface.

Draining the ricotta and filling just before eating

In Sicily, sheep’s milk ricotta is the classic filling. Excess whey is drained off, and the ricotta is pressed through a fine sieve and mixed with sugar and vanilla. The aim is not to whip it vigorously but to smooth out its grains into a silky cream. Ricotta is a dairy product made by reheating whey, and it differs from cream cheese in both its ingredients and how it is made.

Adding candied orange or other fruit, or chopped dark chocolate, gives the ricotta aroma and the bite of small pieces. A finish of pistachios or similar nuts on the ends adds a granular texture and color separate from the filling. Differences between makers also show in the smoothness of the ricotta, whether fruit is included, and the size of the chocolate pieces.

Cannoli are filled just before eating to keep the fried shell from becoming soggy. If the moist ricotta goes in too early, the shell absorbs moisture and loses its crispness. If the shells are made in advance and cooled, and the filling is prepared separately, the cannoli can be filled after an order is received.

Origin legends of courts and convents, and records from the towns

One story holds that in Caltanissetta, during the period of Arab rule, the women of the emir’s court competed in making sweets and invented the long, slender tube. Some versions go on to say that after the Norman conquest, these women entered a convent and passed on the recipe. Other tellings, however, say that nuns themselves adapted an older tube-shaped pastry for Carnival, so the versions differ on where it was invented, who invented it, and whether it was passed on from the court. These are several legends presented by the ethnographic museum in Floridia, and no recipe from the time of invention survives.

A dictionary by Michele Del Bono, published in 1751, includes a pastry made by filling a thin tube with a white milk-based filling. In the 19th century, Giuseppe Pitrè recorded the custom of making cannoli in shops and homes at the end of Carnival and giving them as gifts. Convents of nuns in Palermo also made sweets and sold them to townspeople through a revolving window. In this way, festive sweets made in convents were also sold to people in the town. By the end of the 19th century, decorating the top or ends of the tube with candied orange peel had also become widespread, making the pastries seen in shops more elaborate in appearance. It is not certain whether today’s cannoli originated in convents, or when they originated.

Cannoli spread by emigrants and changes in the United States

In the 20th century, people who emigrated from the island brought cannoli to shops on the Italian mainland and in the United States. At the Termini Brothers shop, which opened in Philadelphia in 1921, ricotta-filled tubes were sold alongside wedding pastries. In shops in their new homes as well, the shells are kept dry and the ricotta cold, and the two are combined at the time of filling.

Simone Cinotto, who studies the food and narratives of Italian Americans, discusses the sharing of food in connection with family and community bonds and with memories of the homeland. Viewed against the background of this food culture, the cannoli that Clemenza brings home also convey their meaning as a household sweet. The scene in the film and the history of pastry shops that took root in their new homes show connections to the homeland in different ways.

In Boston, some shops use shells that differ from the traditional kind. In a 2023 kitchen report by the broadcaster WBUR, JoJo Bova of Bova’s was making cannoli not with a fried flour tube but with a thin florentine shell. A batter of almonds, sugar, honey, cream, and butter is baked flat, wrapped around a wooden rod while still soft, and filled with ricotta. In this example, the method of wrapping the dough around a core is the same, but the texture of the shell itself changes.

Even within Boston, some shops buy in traditional shells and fill them with a different cream, while others make their fried shells in-house and fill them after an order is placed. Crispness depends not only on the type of shell but also on when it is filled.

A short film column: the cannoli in The Godfather Part III

Note: The following includes details about the ending of The Godfather Part III (1990).

In the third film, cannoli become an even more direct instrument of murder. Near the end, at a theater in Palermo, Sicily, Connie gives poisoned cannoli to her enemy Altobello. Altobello eats the pastry and dies.

In the first film, they were a household sweet taken home after a killing; in the third, they become a gift that disarms the target’s suspicion. Placing the two scenes side by side reveals different ways in which a familiar food is used in a story of violence. This is the role given to cannoli within the films, and it does not directly represent actual Mafia customs or the lives of people in Sicily.

Glossary