30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEDinner is over. The candles have burned down, the wine is finished and on the tablecloth lies what's left after every successful evening: breadcrumbs, a little flaky salt, the odd flake of this morning's croissant. This is when Briciola makes its entrance. The name means crumb in Italian, and few things have ever been given a more beautiful name for such a simple task.
Briciola consists of a small brush and a stainless steel crumb pan with American walnut handles. The stainless steel is cool and shiny against your fingertips, the walnut warm and smooth in your palm, and together they give the feeling of holding something that someone has thought about for a long time. The brush glides over the tablecloth in light strokes and gathers the crumbs into the pan without spreading them further. When you're done, you bring the brush to the pan and feel a discreet click. Hidden magnets hold the two parts together, so the set becomes a single object again, ready to go back in its place.
This is not a dustpan and brush you hide in the cleaning cupboard. Briciola is made to be left out, on the sideboard, next to the bread basket or beside the pasta machine, where it looks just as good as everything else you've chosen because it's beautiful. After making pasta, it gathers the flour from the worktop. After breakfast, it takes care of the breadcrumbs. After dinner, it rounds off the evening.
Briciola is part of Marcato's Heritage range, where every part is carefully selected and assembled by hand, and where the idea is that kitchen tools should be as beautiful to look at as they are to use. Marcato has been making kitchen tools in Campodarsego near Padua since 1930, and the whole of that history shows in Heritage.
Available in two versions. The standard version has a compact brush with soft, dark horsehair bristles, a wooden handle and metal edges. Horsehair is supple and picks up even the finest flour, and the brush is just as good for cleaning the pasta machine as the tablecloth. The Veg version is fully vegan, with firm coconut fibre bristles and a pan shaped like a small tray with sloping sides, which makes it even easier to gather up the crumbs. Both have a stainless steel pan with an American walnut handle and hidden magnets that hold the set together.
