White flour, yellow cornmeal, almonds, sugar, butter, eggs and lemon zest, kneaded into a sandy, compact dough: sbrisolona is not sliced but broken by hand, into irregular shards. The name comes from the Mantuan dialect word «brìsa», crumb, and describes exactly its crumbly nature.
The poorer version, the one from farmhouses, used only corn flour, lard and hazelnuts in place of almonds; the richer version, with white flour, butter and almonds, had already reached the table of the Gonzaga, lords of Mantova, before the seventeenth century.
It is eaten with a glass of grappa, or a dessert wine such as Malvasia or Vin Santo, broken on the table and passed hand to hand. It is a Traditional Agri-food Product of Lombardia, tied in particular to the province of Mantova.
