Having a grandmother who came from Lake Garda meant I received many gifts, including a rare and precious recipe: Sanvigilini biscuits. Flour, butter, sugar, raisins, yeast, eggs, grated lemon. These few simple ingredients, characteristic of traditional recipes, are connected to my childhood and the joy of the time my grandmother spent with me!
Whenever she made them—usually on Friday so she could leave me a big bag of them to take home for the weekend—I couldn’t resist the temptation to taste them raw! My grandmother would threaten to punish me, but after my third raw biscuit she would literally throw me out of the kitchen!
She reminded me with increasing frequency over the years that the recipe was as old as she was! Indeed, she herself was a child in the 1940s when, as legend has it, an innkeeper at the Locanda Punta San Vigilio first made them for Winston Churchill! It is, in fact, no coincidence that the recipe calls for a fair amount of butter—a tribute to traditional Anglo-Saxon biscuits.
