How a Sicilian bakery is keeping centuries-old nuns’ recipes alive

The “Secrets of the Cloister” project was born to preserve the wonderful pastry and cake recipes developed by cloistered nuns for the past 800 years.


From cannoli to almond biscotti, passing through cassatelle — semi-circular dough pockets filled with ricotta — we owe much of Sicily’s wonderful pastry culture to the creativity of cloistered nuns who, since at least the 13th century, turned the simple ingredients they could source locally into signature desserts.

As explained in a recent Aleteia story, this tradition has roots in the Middle Ages when nuns used to bake sweet goods like biscotti to gift them to high profile visitors such as bishops, doctors, or accountants. In the second half of the 15th century, sugar became more commonly available and this pastry-making tradition started to expand, with nuns making all sorts of sweet creations to sell.

For centuries, Sicilians were used to visiting monasteries such as the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, founded in 1299 in Agrigento, or the Benedictine convent of Palma di Montechiaro, during festivities. Here, they patiently waited for their turn to buy trays of freshly baked cannoli, cassatelle or nucatili — hard cookies filled with nuts and cinnamon.

In recent years, many of these monasteries have shut down. It is estimated that there were as many as 21 pastry-making convents in Palermo in the 18th century while today there are only a few left. As cloistered nuns progressively disappeared from Sicilian life, the centuries-old recipes that they had devised were on the verge of being lost. But the love Sicilians have for these nun-invented pastries is helping preserve this long-standing tradition.

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