A charming and amusing memoir celebrating family and the pleasures of a home-cooked meal.
I was aware of Stanley Tucci as an actor but not of his interest in food and cooking, as I don’t follow celebrity news and gossip. The book is a collection of recipes, food facts and histories intertwined with memories and anecdotes which represent Tucci’s love of food—both cooking and eating it. We get glimpses of his life, likes and loves through this lens. Having read Taste: My Life Through Food I wish we could see his Emmy award-winning television series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy here in Australia.
Tucci grew up in an almost stereotypical Italian-American family. The son of an art teacher, his grandparents emigrated from Calabria, and he grew up in Katonah in New York state. He remembers his mother as always being in the kitchen cooking recipes she had learned from her mother. Young Stanley’s lunchbox sandwiches were much sought after by his friends, and he would happily exchange a nutritious scrambled egg and grilled pepper on Italian bread for his best friend’s daily fare of Marshmallow Fluff on white bread.
Perhaps because it is not chronological, the book seems to wander a little at the start, trying to find its rhythm before Tucci’s well-known style and charm brings cohesion to the narrative. As one might expect from a book by a celebrity, there is plenty of name dropping, such as dining with Meryl Streep in France on andouillette—a disgusting-sounding sausage made by stuffing a pig’s intestine with other bits of the pig. And who would have thought that Spaghetti Bolognese, a dish created to represent Italy’s unification using southern pasta and northern ragù alla Bolognese, is actually hard to find in Italy?
My favourite anecdote reminded me of conversations I had with my own mother, even though she was from Yorkshire, not Italy. Tucci remembers the conversation from when he was a child upon visiting his maternal grandparents. With traditional Italian generosity, his mother had brought her mother some of her favourite cheese. When the family was leaving, Grandmother handed her daughter a bulging bag.
“What’s this doing in here?” says Tucci’s mother, looking at the cheese she’d brought for her mother.
“You take it … you like it,” his grandmother replies.
“So do you … that’s why I bought it for you!”
“I got enough cheese.”
This is not a detailed memoir but does include references to his wife who died of cancer and his second marriage and children. Remembering the illness and death of his first wife, Tucci only sought treatment for an oral cancer when he could no longer ignore a lump in his mouth. Given the importance of food and cooking in his life, his diagnosis must have been devasting. Over three years of treatment, he endured being tube fed for six months, not knowing whether he’d ever be able to eat and taste food normally again. Tucci is currently clear of cancer and can again delight in his passions of cooking, sharing and eating food.
Reviewed by Jan Kershaw
Distributed by: Penguin Books Australia
Released: October 2021
RRP: $45
This review is the opinion of the reviewer and not Glam Adelaide.
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