One hundred Italian family recipes from Laura Vitale, who moved to the United States from Italy as a teenager and was homesick less for a country than for her nonna cooking. Laura in the Kitchen grew out of that, and this is the book version of it.

The slow Sunday sauces loaded with pork ribs and braised beef and plenty of red wine. The weeknight pastas that take twenty minutes. The vegetables Italians actually eat, the bakes, the desserts. It is the food of an Italian household rather than an Italian restaurant, which is a genuinely different and much more useful thing.

Laura writes the way she films: warmly, in detail, assuming you are capable. The interior spreads are full of the finished dishes and the hands making them, and every recipe is one somebody in her family actually cooks.