cannelloni

Cannelloni takes its name from the Italian cannellone, the augmentative of cannello, a small tube or pipe. Cannello itself descends from canna, the Latin and Italian word for a reed or hollow stalk. The same root gives English canal, channel, and cannon. By the time Italian cooks began rolling pasta sheets around fillings, they already had a precise word waiting: canna named the hollow form before the dish existed.

The earliest written recipe for stuffed rolled pasta tubes appears in Neapolitan manuscripts of the late nineteenth century, though cooks in both Campania and Emilia-Romagna claim the dish. Salvatore Di Giacomo, the Neapolitan poet, mentioned them in passing in the 1880s. The form was always the point: a cylinder of dough large enough to hold a filling of meat, ricotta, or vegetables, then baked under a sauce.

Cannelloni entered English cookbooks through Italian immigration to Britain and North America between 1900 and 1930. By the 1950s, Elizabeth David had described them in Italian Food, and American home economists were translating Italian recipes for mass-market magazines. The name stayed Italian because no English equivalent existed for the specific combination of shape and size.

The industrial pasta industry standardized cannelloni as a dried tube in the twentieth century, but home cooks in Italy continued rolling fresh sheets. Both versions carry the same name, which produces a useful confusion at Italian markets. A package of dried cannelloni and a fresh-rolled pasta sheet share only the hollow center and the ancient word for the reed that inspired both.