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Love Italian food, both the traditional Italian and the Americanized version. My Sicilian grandmother would have card tables loaded with drying homemade ravioli on our Sunday visits. I never appreciated how much work she put into those dinners until I became an adult and started recreating them.
Not all Italian food is that labor intensive, though. My mother was a great cook (learned from her mom) and she would put together some easy meals she grew up with. She would drop some eggs into simmering tomato sauce, or scramble peas and eggs for a quick meal. One of my favorite meals is peppers sauteed in olive oil and served in a sandwich of fresh Italian bread.
The only food I never acquired a taste for was seafood, which is a staple of Sicilian cuisine. Ick.
I thought the filling was different. I believe (I could be wrong) canalloni has a meat filling of chicken/veal/pork, while manicotti has a filling like spinach and ricotta. The pasta is always the same. Homemade pasta cut into pieces, then filled with the filling and rolled.
I have never thought that manicotti and cannelloni are the same thing. Similar, but not the same. My general impression is that manicotti is a pasta shell, thickish, while cannelloni is more of a crepe and thinner. I think of cannelloni as more 'delicate' than manicotti.
Don't believe what you read in eHow. There is no such thing as pre formed pasta to stuff in Italy. That's an American thing, if you are talking authentic Italian food.
I think we can all agree that there is no unanimous opinion on what country has the "Best In The World!"
We all have different tastes and different opinions. It's like saying 'X' is the most beautiful woman in the world, or 'Y' is the best city in the world, or 'Z' is the smartest man in the world.
What we can say is this: Italian food is so beloved all over the world that you can find Italian restaurants in nearly every country in the world. Italian dishes are served in the finest hotels and fanciest cruise ships. Yes, there are people who would rank other cuisines above Italian - but there are many people who put Italian in the #1 spot.
Let me say something about classical or Cordon Bleu French cuisine.
Years ago I had a good friend and roommate who was a professional chef - a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America - which is considered by many the premier cooking school in the US. More recently I had a tenant who was a student at The Restaurant School At Walnut Hill College in Philadelphia, also highly regarded in the culinary industry. Both individuals had to master French cooking, appreciation of French wines, make trips to France, and so on.
Most Americans cannot appreciate French cuisine. Firstly, only the larger cities would even have a French restaurant. Secondly it is often very costly and considered very fancy, something many Americans regard with disdain. Very few people have heard of Escoffier or even James Beard but I think many people have at least heard of Julia Child.
Classical French food is really exquisite. It is chefs trained in French cooking that prepare banquets in the White House, Buckingham Palace, and the very finest of the 5 star hotels around the world. The French have a history of Royalty and Imperial nobility that spans centuries and their cooking is highly evolved and complicated, often using the most expensive ingredients. Famous dishes like Boeuf Wellington, Poulet a la Kiev, Canard a l'Orange, and Homard a l'Americaine are inventions by French chefs.
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