[Sca-cooks] Angel's food and cannoli

[Christiane]

The discussion about angel's food makes me wonder if the Catalan recipe for angel's food came from Sicily after the Aragonese got the Sicilian crown after the Vespers (1282); there were quite a few Aragonese and Catalan on the island after that, knights and merchants alike, and a lot of trade back and forth.

Or if the Sicilians got the idea of stuffing the cannoli with angel's food from the Catalan. Because the basic Sicilian cannoli filling recipe even today is fresh sheep's milk ricotta, sugar, and orange flower water (the addition of the candied fruit and chocolate seems to have come during Baroque times, as well as the use of vanilla, but ricotta-cream-filled cannoli themselves have been traced to Arab times). Some cooks sniff at the addition of bittersweet chocolate, saying it's a crutch, and like to use pistachios instead.

Either way, angel's food is a way to enjoy basic cannoli filling without fiddling with the shells! (And I can understand that; a kid, I would scrape out all of the filling from my cannoli and eat it with a spoon and broken-up pieces of the cannoli shell.) 

Giannotta