To my mind, there are two types of cookbooks: the aspirational, inspirational sort; and the practical, the day-to-day.
Aspirational cookbooks are the ones that prompt you to seek out jars of spices you can’t pronounce or nervously ask your butcher for specific, obscure parts of a cow. They tend to sit on my bookshelf mostly gathering dust, but should be a true pleasure to flick through, and reward you deeply on those occasional Sundays when you can muster up the courage and energy to cook from them. The Book of St. John sits firmly in this category with its three ways to cook an ox tongue, as does every Ottolenghi book I’ve ever looked at. Jeremy Lee’s Cooking is the most recent addition to my aspirational collection - a beautiful book that’s never too intimidating, but packs plenty of project suppers.
Practical books are the ones I rapidly cover in stains and smudges, the books that tend to linger near the kitchen rather than retreat fully to the shelf. Child that I am, they’re often the ones with lots of pretty pictures to excite the appetite. They should offer a mix of meals you can imagine yourself cooking with sleeves rolled up and an apron on, and others you actually will cook on a tired Thursday night with a glass of wine in your hand. Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat is archetypal; Rachel Roddy’s An A-Z of Pasta unsurprisingly fits the bill; and Nigel Slater’s A Cook’s Book has been my go-to for some time.
Brutto: A (Simple) Florentine Cookbook, the late Russell Norman’s collection of recipes from his Farringdon restaurant of the same name, is indisputably a practical book. In a few weeks with Brutto I’ve cooked from it five times, more than some tomes I’ve owned for years, and there are plenty of recipes left that I’m in no small rush to get to.
Brutto’s relative simplicity comes as a slight surprise, because I wouldn’t say the same for Polpo, Norman’s previous book, based on his previous restaurant. The Polpo book makes you work a little. It’s dominated by recipes for seafood you’ll only get from the fishmonger or cuts of meat you won’t find in the supermarket, and even its simpler dishes often look labour-intensive. What I’ve cooked from Polpo I’ve enjoyed, but it’s a book I often pick up and put back down, nothing so inspiring as to justify the hard work required.
Probably in part this simply speaks to my tastes. Polpo, as a Venetian book, is understandably dominated by seafood. Brutto, by contrast, features scarcely a handful of fish dishes, and is more likely to make you good friends with your butcher.
Some classics are covered, and plenty of dishes you might recognise from the menu at Brutto itself. Pork tonnato, the archetypal Florentine T-bone steak, even a not-technically-Tuscan meat ragu recipe. I couldn’t resist trying Norman’s take on pasta alla vodka, a recipe that doesn’t stray too far from the tried and tested, but results in a dish that hums with heat and fire. When I can track down boar sausages I’m sure I’ll be straight into his boar and chianti pasta sauce, and the simple take on rare roast beef and potatoes wouldn’t look out of place in either an Italian or British kitchen. I’m relieved to find a recipe for the restaurant’s criminally good rabbit pasta, and suspect it might lead me to update my own in due time.
Not every dish is so typical. A simple one-pot chicken dish is elevated by the combination of black, fruity olives and whole bunches of sweet, dark grapes. It’s one of those simpler-than-it-looks dishes I can’t help but mentally file away for dinner parties to come, led by a striking flavour combination I can see myself re-purposing in countless other ways. I feel the same way about lamb chops baked in parchment paper together with a handful of vegetables, topped with anchovy fillets that dissolve into the meat while it steams.
It’s not all carnivorous. There are pastas, salads, and vegetable sides in force, most of the devilishly simple Italian type that really force you to get your act together and buy good produce. I put a creamy baked spinach to the test - the sort of vegetable dish you could never insult by calling ‘healthy’ - but I can’t wait to find a cabbage good enough for the raw slaw, seasoned only by salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon.
The book itself is beautiful. Like Polpo before it’s bound without a spine, an artful touch that does admittedly make me worry a little about how long it will survive getting chucked around a small kitchen. Every recipe is photographed simply but artfully by Jenny Zarins, and splitting the book up by Italian coursing - primi, secondi, dolci etc. - keeps things practical, whether you’re browsing for inspiration or hunting down a specific recipe you half-remember.
In true Tuscan style, beans feature prominently - in his intro Norman notes that the Tuscans are nicknamed mangiafagioli, or bean eaters, elsewhere in Italy. There’s a simple side of cannellini that I’ll make the moment I remember to actually soak beans overnight; a salad of tinned beans and tuna; and a blend of cannellini, polenta, chard, and pancetta that caught my attention the moment I opened the book.
Simplicity is also reflected in Brutto’s friendly insistence on including some Italian essentials. You’ll find basic instructions for pasta dough, salsa verde, and even vegetable stock, the book assuming nothing about the experience or expertise a reader might bring to it.
There’s a little baking, but not much. A handful of appealing desserts and biscotti; the saltless Tuscan bread that I’m not sure even Brutto could bring me to love, though I suppose I’d better give baking it a go eventually; and a focaccia recipe that’s up there with the best I’ve tried, and simpler than most to assemble. A selection of cocktails follow, including the infamous house negroni, and the book closes with a selection of Norman’s favourite restaurants in Florence itself - two of which I can vouch for.
It’s a neat way of tying together the sense that this is both a cookbook for Brutto and one for Florence. Regional Italian cooking is old hat in the UK by now, and there are plenty of cookbooks around with a focus on Tuscany, but Norman’s deep and abiding love for Florence and its food shines through. Each recipe is accompanied by a few lines of introduction, most recounting the first time he cooked a dish or stumbled upon it on a restaurant menu, creating a makeshift diary of his visits to one of Italy’s great cities.
There’s a beauty in that, but it’s the practicality of Brutto that I really love. This is a book I’ve cooked from every week since I got it, and one I could imagine cooking from weekly for some time to come. There’s so much here that I not only want to cook, but expect to: the anchovies with orange zest, the pork and sage ravioli, the Italian Old Fashioned that’s calling my name from the back pages.
This is the best kind of cookbook: one I doubt I’ll ever stop cooking from.