The name ‘Pana Cotta’ could not be found in Italian cookbooks until the 1960s but is said to be a traditional dessert from the Piedmont region, in northwestern Italy. There is a story that this dessert was invented by a Hungarian woman in Lange in the western part of the region in the early 1990s. In a dictionary published in 1879, there was a record of a food called Latte Inglese, or English milk, made from cream and cooked with gelatin, then poured into q mold. Another book, published at around the same time, stated that Latte Inglese was made from egg yolks.

Piedmont later added panna cotta to the region’s traditional delicacies in 2001, with the main ingredients being cream, milk, sugar, vanilla, gelatin, rum and Marsala wine poured into molds with caramel underneath. However, there are some textbooks that maintain that the original panna cotta was made with peach brandy and no sauces or other ingredients.