Cannelloni and the difficulties of origins
"The stuffed pancakes so often called cannelloni on the menus of Italian restaurants abroad are a very coarse version of the genuine cannelloni. Any old scraps of meat, corned beef, or cold roast mutton, gingered up with fried onions and tomato sauce, will not make a good cannelloni; the stuffing should be fresh and delicate.
It is also important that the filling be put on with a light hand, or it makes too compact a mass, cloying and heavy" Elizabeth David
We had cannelloni for dinner the other night - a spinach and cheese type that I cobbled together from various things I had in the fridge, and some fresh ricotta from the supermarket. And I confess it was completely satisfactory. Something was missing. So I thought I would look into cannelloni - the various types, the history, etc. as well as searching out classic and also different recipes. The headline picture is of one of Jamie Oliver's versions - a spinach and ricotta one, though not quite like mine as he obviously used a tomato sauce. I had a mixture of cream and the spinach cooking water as my sauce. If you click on the picture it will take you to Jamie's recipe. It looks rather better than mine.
He has about half a dozen recipes on his website, but interestingly in his Jamie's Italy cookbook there is not one. And bearing in mind Elizabeth David's comments about the use of leftovers I was also surprised not to find a recipe in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book on leftovers. For to my mind cannelloni are really a perfect medium for leftovers - whether it be the sauce or the filling. Robert Carrier has included it in his Great Dishes of the World though, so he obviously thinks it's an important world recipe.
The picture above is of a fresh meat version.
But going back to leftovers, it seems that in Barcelona there is a 'traditional' version called canelons which is really very much the same thing, but it is made with the leftover meat from Christmas Day - for it is traditionally eaten on Boxing Day. One site even mentioned that the difference between canelons and cannelloni was that the canelons were made with roasted meat and the cannelloni with mincemeat. On the Welcome to Barcelona site there are two versions of the origins of this canelons, which the author, Tytti, says may or may not be true but make a nice story. You would have to read the post to make real sense of the following, but I thought the generality of what it is saying applied very well to origin stories - of all kinds.
"So many elements of the story—the spread of French high cuisine by non-French cooks, the tangled relationship between feminism and women in the kitchen, the industrialization of pasta, the recent invention of national dishes, the difference that just one person can make—crop up time and again." Tytti - Welcome to Barcelona
For when I came to look into the origins I found several different, but the same - sort of - stories of one chef or another inventing it. And almost all of these dated to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The earliest date I found with this kind of story was the 18th century. But then this is what Claudia Roden in her book The Food of Italy says:
"Cannelloni were born in Amalfi which was once a great naval power and important centre of trade with the East. The town made itself a free republic in 839, and boasts a style of cooking all of its own." Claudia Roden
The implication is that the dish originated way way back. Incidentally, those other origin stories are located in Naples and Emilia Romagna - home of bolognaise sauce. I even saw Umbria and Le Marche mentioned as well.
So basically, who knows who invented it and when. Personally I reckon it would have been invented when they invented pasta. Because really it's a bit of pasta rolled up around a filling. A sort of pie. And people have been making pies since forever. Elizabeth David goes on to describe them as rolled up pancakes, even though this dish - for which she has a recipe - is called crespolini. This really is the kind of dish for which there is no original recipe. It's a concept rather than an actual recipe.
In the twentieth century they found a way to make tubes of dried pasta - cannelloni ready made - and this may well have been in America - where this is the type most usually used. In America they are called marricotti. Maybe they have cannelloni too when it's fresh pasta, but on the whole the Americans call them Maricotti. I have tried to make cannelloni with ready made dried pasta but it's much harder to do than with fresh lasagne sheets or home-made pasta. Especially if you partially cook them first - then they go all wobbly and slippery. Very tricky.
Mind you Donna Hay makes them look good - well she's good at that - by standing the tubes upright. I think that would be much harder to do with fresh pasta.
She also has several recipes for cannelloni on her website, some of them really quite interesting. And another in her New Classics cookbook, which has a white bean, olive and basil filling. The ingredients for the filling are just mixed together in a bowl and consist of: 1 cup parmesan, 1/2 cup pitted black olives, chopped, 1/2 cup chopped basil, 1 x 400g cannellini beans, drained and rinsed, salt and pepper. Fill the cannelloni and cover with a tomato sauce and cheese. It looks yummy and I have been meaning to try it some day when I want to be vegetarian. Here's a picture.
So what do all our other modern cooks do?
Mostly they seem to go for variations of the spinach and cheese version, which is interesting because the only version in my Italy the Beautiful Cookbook is a meat-filled one, said to be from Emilia Romagna. Mind you there are also meat versions with spinach and/or cheese as well. In the spinach version the cheese varies, as does the spinach - I've seen various other greens, such as kale and broccoli suggested. Sylvia Colloca has a rather good looking version on the delicious website - shown below.
And delicious also had some other good looking versions - the one above being an example of a spinach one - but without much cheese by the looks of things.
And going back to Elizabeth David and her 'light hand' with the filling, I notice that lots of the best looking versions do not seem to have a huge amount of filling. Maybe that was one of the things wrong with my own attempt the other day, for it wasn't my best. Maybe it was the lack of tomato sauce - the cream and spinach water were a tiny bit watery - but better on day two - there were leftovers.
I tired to find more 'out there' versions just for fun but couldn't really find many. Two worth mentioning are potatoes and porcini (on the left below) and a Nigel Slater fast one - asparagus (on the right). This is literally an asparagus rolled up in pasta and cooked in what looks like a tomato sauce, though elsewhere I found that béchamel sauce was the thing. I couldn't actually find this recipe so I'm guessing as to whether you cook the asparagus first or not. I'm guessing not, as the whole thing has to be cooked in the oven anyway. You will find it in Eat - a Little Book of Fast Food.
Really you can fill with anything you fancy. Seafood is a popular thing. Just adjust the kind of sauce you use to the filling you have. And the sauce can be as simple as a ladle of chicken stock - which I think is what Elizabeth David recommends - plus oodles of butter and cheese of course.
I should make them more often, because they are really easy and very versatile.
Then, of course, there's spanakopita - fascinating how the same but similar pops up everywhere, and how therefore it's virtually impossible to pin an origin down. For all I know the Romans probably had a version. Like I said, it's basically a sort of pie. I suppose the difference is that it's cooked in the oven with a sauce on top. You don't do that to pies.
