A few months ago, I came across my mother’s cannoli recipe, which was typed out on two now-yellowed pages and still stapled together. The xeroxed copy dates to the late 1970s, when Mom used to teach cooking classes in her New Jersey kitchen. She had given it to me eons ago, along with copies of her recipes for egg pasta dough, Bolognese sauce, stuffed zucchini, tiramisu and more. Over the years, I’ve made and served all of them —  all except the cannoli. It’s one of those recipes I always meant to tackle but never got around to.

Cannoli are without a doubt Sicily’s most famous contribution to the world of pastry, and although Gabriella Marchetti was not born in Sicily (she is from Abruzzo), her cannoli were as good as any I’ve had and better than most: crisp-fried tubular shells that crunch and shatter just a little —  not completely —  when you bite into them, with a filling of rich, vanilla-scented, whipped ricotta cream.