Cassata, Cannoli and Marzipan Fruit: Sicilian Sweets Explained

Sicilian pastry is built on three things: sheep's milk ricotta, almonds, and a calendar. Nearly every famous sweet on the island is a combination of the first two, made for a specific day of the year, and the old rule was that you ate it then and not otherwise. That rule has loosened, but it still explains what you find in a window in February and what you do not.

What is cassata made of?

Sponge cake, sweetened sheep's ricotta, candied fruit, and a shell of green marzipan under a white icing, usually with chocolate in the ricotta and whole candied fruit arranged on top.

The name probably comes from the Arabic qas'at, a basin, or from the Latin caseum, cheese. The ingredients that make it possible, sugar cane, almonds and citrus, arrived with Arab rule, which is why the dessert is usually traced to the eleventh century and why it looks more like something from Palermo's markets than from a French pastry book.

It is a cake, not an ice cream. The frozen thing sold under the name in other countries, cassata gelato, is a later and separate invention.

Its home is Easter, and its home city is Palermo. There is a famous story that a synod of Sicilian bishops at Mazara del Vallo in 1575 pronounced on the cassata: some versions say the synod called it indispensable at feasts, others that it forbade convents from making it during Lent because it was distracting the nuns from prayer. The versions disagree, which tells you enough about the dessert.

Is a cassata cake the same thing as the one in Cleveland?

No, and this catches out Italian Americans from Ohio every time.

The Cleveland cassata cake is a layered yellow sponge soaked in rum syrup, filled with custard and fresh strawberries and covered in whipped cream. It is a genuine local tradition of the Italian American bakeries there, it is very good, and it has no ricotta, no candied fruit and no marzipan. If you order a cassata in Sicily expecting strawberries and cream, you will get something much heavier and much older.

The cannolo, and the one rule

A cannolo is a tube of fried pastry, the scorza, filled with sweetened sheep's ricotta, often with chocolate chips or candied fruit or chopped pistachio at the ends.

The rule is that it is filled when you order it. Ricotta softens the shell within minutes, so a tray of pre-filled cannoli in a display case is a tray of cannoli that will not crunch. A bar that fills them in front of you is telling you something about itself.

The tradition traces the cannolo to the Arab period and to convents near Caltanissetta, in the middle of the island, where it was originally a Carnival sweet. Like the cassata, it escaped its date on the calendar long ago.

Good ricotta is the whole thing. It should be sheep's milk, sieved, sweet but not sugary, and it should taste faintly of the animal. In eastern Sicily the ricotta comes from the Hyblaean hills, which is where our journeys spend a day on a working farm.

Frutta martorana: marzipan that looks like fruit

Marzipan fruit is almond paste, ground with sugar, shaped into peaches, figs, prickly pears, chestnuts and lemons, then painted by hand until it is indistinguishable from the real thing at arm's length.

It is called frutta martorana after the Benedictine convent of the Martorana in Palermo, founded in 1193 beside the Norman church of Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio, where the nuns made them. The traditional date is the Day of the Dead, November 2, when Sicilian children used to wake to find sweets left, they were told, by their dead relatives, in a basket called u cannistru along with sugar puppets painted like the knights of the puppet theater.

What does it taste like? Almonds and sugar, with a marzipan density that is firmer and less cloying than the northern European kind. It is not a light dessert, and one piece is a portion.

The Sicilian year, in sweets

• February 3 to 5, Catania. The minne di Sant'Agata, small domed pastries of shortcrust filled with ricotta, chocolate and candied fruit, made for the feast of the city's patron saint and named, unambiguously, after the breasts the saint was mutilated of in the third century.
• Carnival, everywhere. Where the cannolo began.
• Easter. Cassata, lamb-shaped marzipan, and every version of ricotta pastry the island has.
• November 2. Frutta martorana and the sweets of the dead.
• December 13, Syracuse. Cuccìa: boiled wheat, eaten either sweet with ricotta cream or savory, for the feast of Saint Lucy. The story is that in 1763 the city was starving and a ship full of wheat arrived in the harbor after the people prayed to her, and they boiled the grain and ate it without waiting to mill it. Our guide to ancient Syracuse covers the city the rest of the year.

Why sheep's ricotta matters

Ricotta is not a cheese but a by-product of cheesemaking, made by heating the whey left over. Sheep's milk gives it fat and flavor; cow's milk gives it neither, and the difference between a good cannolo and a sad one is usually there rather than in the pastry.

It is also seasonal. Sheep produce milk from late autumn through spring, so the best ricotta is a winter and spring product, and August cannoli in a tourist town are made from whatever is available. If you care, ask which ricotta they use. In Sicily the question is normal.

What to order, and where

Look for a pastry shop that makes a short list well, fills cannoli on the spot, and sells mostly to people who live nearby. Prices are low by American standards: a cannolo and a coffee is a small transaction.

In the morning, the island is eating granita and brioche rather than pastry. Sweets belong to the late afternoon, after five, or to Sunday lunch, when Sicilians carry a tray of them to somebody's house. Our guide to what to eat in eastern Sicily sets out the rest of the day, and the one on Catania's fish market covers the savory street food.

Eating them where they are made

Our Sicilian journeys build the food into the days rather than into a restaurant list: a market and a private cooking class, a farm in the Hyblaean hills where lunch comes out of the land around it, and the cannolo on the first day in Taormina, which is the Jasmine route's own idea of an introduction. Dates and details are on the journey pages, and Design your trip is where a food-led trip of your own starts.