Brutto, by Russell Norman

For the love of Florence

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 …