Polenta e bruscitti is the Lombard slow-braised beef stew: chunks of beef shoulder cooked with red wine, butter and fennel seed for three hours until falling-tender, served on a wide raft of corn polenta.

The bruscitti (literally 'small fragments') of the Busto Arsizio plain north-west of Milan are first recorded in the 1860s as a Sunday dish for the Lombard farming households. The slow braise with butter, red wine and a fennel-seed-and-rosemary aromatic profile is the canonical Northern Lombard preparation. The polenta on the side is the rule, soft polenta in modern restaurants, hard polenta sliced for the classical Lombard farmstead style. Trattoria Masuelli San Marco and Antica Trattoria della Pesa serve canonical versions of the dish in central Milan; Ratana cooks a modernised version with house-pulled polenta.

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