If you don’t like fennel seeds to remain in the dish when finished you can wrap them up in a piece of gauze instead, making them easy to remove at the end. Alternatively, replace them with a bay leaf.

The cuisine of Busto Arsizio is known as ‘bustocca’: once, it is claimed, this dish was made from bits of meat that were eliminated during the tanning process. This theory is not well supported, and therefore a second version is that the meat scraps were simply slaughter waste.