From the introduction: 

"The ability to make do with what is to hand - l'arte di arrangiarsi - means that for every traditional Tuscan' dish, there is no one definitive version or recipe, despite what some may claim. Within the same area you can often go from house to house and find slightly different cooking methods, textures, herbs or seasonings used to make ostensibly the same thing. It's an attitude that can be summed up in the saying A occhio e quanto basta, meaning that you make something by eye, and with as much as you need.

Leaf through any cookbook originally written in Italian and you will note that in the list of ingredients for each recipe, there is a distinct lack of hand-holding for the reader. Salt will be included in the list of needed items, as will the ubiquitous olio EVO (extra vergine oliva), but instead of listing the number of teaspoons or tablespoons you need, they'll be followed by the initials 'q.b.' - meaning quanto basta, or 'as much as is needed'. These two letters represent so much of what Italian cooking is about. They illustrate in black and white how preparing a meal doesn't need to be the exacting affair that many people find it to be. There's no need, when preparing a savoury meal, to painstakingly measure out tablespoons of olive oil when a generous glug will do the trick. The concept of quanto basta invites us to cook in the way that I believe leads to the most straightforward, tasty and rewarding food - which is that if you add ingredients little by little and taste as you go along, the quantities (within reason) don't matter quite so much as we might think and 'mistakes' are usually rectifiable. If that glug of olive oil was a bit too generous, add more of the other ingredients and the result won't be oily.

Aside from baking, where exactness is required to set off the necessary chemical reactions, the 'q.b.' approach to cooking is essentially the basis for all good, simple food that Italy is so famous for, as, through necessity, Italians came up with ways of applying cooking processes to frugal ingredients in order to make them tasty, delicious and nutritious.

This approach is what this book is about and what defines the recipes. They are a collection of dishes that give you the rugged, decisive flavours of Tuscan cuisine, with shortcuts where available, allowing you to use whatever glass you happen to have to hand as a measuring cup, and to pour a few glugs of oil into a pan without getting out the measuring spoons, and to substitute with what you have and not worry too much about following 'the rules' - as no Tuscan ever did."