Brisa in the Mantuan dialect means crumb, a derivation from the Latin brisiare – to break into crumbs – also found in the French verb briser. However, sbrisolona means something rather more colourful than the English culinary term ‘crumble’. At once descriptive and affectionate, it’s closer to ‘big ol’ crumbly’, if I had to attempt a translation.
Big ol’ crumbly was a regular part of my diet when I visited my grandparents, who lived in the south-eastern corner of that province. Cuisine in this part of Italy is ‘of the Prince and the pauper’, meaning that historically farm labourers and the aristocracy ate largely off the same menu, although of course the latter got to pick more than one course per meal and never went without. Still, it’s true to say the most well-known Mantuan dishes originate from the ingenuity of its peasants. This is certainly the case with the sbrisolona, whose earliest documented traces date back to the 16th century and refer to a cake whose main ingredients were nothing if not humble: dripping, cornmeal and nuts.
Upon reaching the table of the family that ruled over the dukedom, the Gonzagas, the original recipe was upgraded by replacing the dripping with butter and the nuts with the noble almond, as well as by adding that most wonderful of new-world spices, vanilla. These ingredients survive today in varying proportions, leading to more rustic or more genteel versions of the sbrisolona. At the rustic end, you’re required to break the cake by hitting it in the middle with your fist. At the genteel end, you can cut it in slices using a knife. If you can imagine such a thing.
The recipe below sits somewhere in the vicinity of the ‘punch this cake’ end of the spectrum. It has as much dripping as butter, and as much cornmeal as flour. Both are necessary in order to produce the ‘true’ sbrisolona, rather than a generic and anonymous crumble. And that is often the thing about the peasants’ table: it’s just much more interesting.
The sbrisolona is a cake for all seasons and latitudes. Light, it is not, but on the other hand – being essentially a piece of edible masonry – it also keeps for a very long time.
Having generously greased a cake dish of a diameter of let’s say 30 cms or thereabouts, we proceed to assemble our ingredients.
200 g cornmeal (the fine kind, Healtheries makes the most common kind in New Zealand)
200 g flour
200 g sugar
(The sbrisolona was also known as the “cake of the three cups” because it required a cupful each of the three main ingredients above. Go with the same quantities, anyway.)
150 g beef dripping (the hard, not the liquid kind – also known confusingly in North America as lard, even though they aren’t the same thing. Crazy Yanks.)
150 g butter
200 g almonds, coarsely ground
2 egg yolks
Pinch of salt, teaspoon of vanilla essence, zest of 1 lemon
While melting the dripping in a saucepan and softening the butter, mix the two flours, sugar, salt, almonds, lemon, vanilla in a bowl. Make a well in the middle and add dripping, butter, yolks, comme ça:
Mix with your hands, messily. You won't get a dough but rather a crumbly series of lumps. You'll think you've done it all wrong.
Turn on your oven to 180°C. Transfer the mixture into your cake dish, without pressing it down too much.
Cook for 45 to 60 minutes, until the top is golden and the edge looks slightly burnt. Let it cool.
If you find that it's too hard to cut it in slices, congratulations: you have made the perfect sbrisolona. However: if you used a dish like the one pictured as opposed to a sponge cake-type tin with a removable bottom, you’re unlikely to be able to lift out the cake. Therefore, don’t punch it in the middle or you’ll just hurt yourself. Use some sort of sharp tool instead to make a crack in the surface. The cake should break into shards, like so.
The shards are not unlike what some outside of Italy call biscotti (which for us is just the word for biscuits) and that in Italy we call cantucci or cantuccini. These are also almond-based and are consumed traditionally by dipping them into vin santo – literally ‘holy wine’ but really a Tuscan style of dessert wine similar to Malvasia. Therefore, it won’t surprise you to know that you can also dip fragments of sbrisolona in a dessert wine or even, I’m told, grappa. But I just take them neat.
Enjoy. Merry Christmas.
On a decidedly less jolly note, I wrote a piece this week for Overland on polite Nazis and the violence of speech, following an appalling episode that occurred last week.
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