Taste: My Life Through Food

Interspersed with recipes, Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food is a warm, generous, and largely humorous account of an extraordinary life. Born in 1960, Tucci has enjoyed a remarkable career as an actor, playing roles as diverse as the outrageous Caesar Flickerman in the Hunger Games series of films and Paul Child, husband to the legendary Julia Child, in Julie & Julia, opposite Meryl Streep. He also co-wrote and co-directed the cult classic Big Night, about two brothers with competing visions for how to save their struggling restaurant. Its themes reverberate throughout the book, in the search for authenticity and the intersection between food and familial love. Tucci has been nominated for an Academy Award, a Tony, and a spoken-word Grammy. He has won two Golden Globes and two Emmy Awards, one of which is for his work on the still-running CNN series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a travelogue of cultural and culinary discoveries. Published by Gallery Books in 2021 and an immediate New York Times bestseller, Taste is a scrumptious morsel to be alternately devoured and savored.

Summary

Tucci invites the reader into his memoir, beginning with the recipe for a Negroni, introduced with the sub-title “What Can I Get You to Drink?” (8). It is as if the reader is in the room with him while he tells his life story. Growing up in a middle-class family in New York, Tucci has what he considers an idyllic childhood, playing in the woods with his siblings and friends. Yet those “carefree activities” are eclipsed by his memories of food: “What was even more wonderful was what and how my family cooked and ate” (12). He praises his mother’s cooking, noting that while she specialized in Italian food, she was adventuresome enough to branch out into Spanish paella, French crepes, and Mexican chili con carne. These are Tucci’s first lessons in the cultural value of food.

He recalls family celebrations on Independence Day and the Christmas holidays. On the Fourth of July, his extended family—many of them first-generation immigrants—celebrates the freedoms and opportunities afforded them by America. Even if they had to leave their homeland behind, these relatives, Tucci’s grandparents included, found ways to preserve certain elements of their cultural heritage. His grandmother canned vast amounts of homemade tomato sauce, while his grandfather made homemade wine—sour, unappetizing, but ultimately full of love and pride, “the sweetest liquid ever to pass our lips” (32). At Christmas, Tucci’s mother would prepare the elaborate Feast of the Seven Fishes, common to Italian Catholic families, while Tucci himself works to pass along holiday traditions to his own family. He even keeps alive the tradition of the Christmas timpano—a laborious and heavy dish that becomes the centerpiece of his film, Big Night—much to the chagrin of his former wife, Kate, and his current wife, Felicity.

Tucci spends a childhood year in Florence, where his father was on sabbatical to study sculpture and drawing. He eats in restaurants in Rome, his first experience of such refined extravagance, and visits family in a poor village in Calabria. The realization of his relative privilege, compared to that of his distant family in Italy, is tempered by his understanding of their joy in simple food and open generosity. In addition, he “had never seen my grandfather so happy. He was back home after many years, among people he loved in a culture that was his” (58). The connections between family, food, and love are unmistakable.

He also details his gustatory limitations: he is diagnosed with lactose intolerance and gluten sensitivities, so he must be vigilant about his food. This leads him to a lengthy dissertation on what makes an authentic ragù, that beloved and ubiquitous Italian meat sauce. His family’s recipe is lovingly included for the reader to enjoy, one among several featured in the book.

After graduating college, Tucci moves to New York, a struggling actor trying to make his mark on the film industry. At one point, he has to rely on the Actors Fund to help him out with rent. He frequents coffee shops and delis during those days, searching for affordable and filling food. The Carnegie Deli, in particular, was a beacon: “Yes, the food was good, but it was also a way to get a dose of old New York while too much of the city was making itself brand-new again and again and again” (82). These kinds of places, he laments, are being lost to gentrification and homogenization, the enemies of authenticity and originality.

Along the way, Tucci begins to realize some success in his career, and he marries his first wife, Kathryn Spath, in the mid-1990s. They both “enjoyed good food” (91) and made it a habit to cook for her parents, who were not as deeply interested in the process—except for Tucci’s father-in-law’s Maine lobster. Tragically, Kate dies of cancer in 2009, though Tucci finds love again with his second wife, Felicity Blunt. Felicity is British, and the family now resides in London, where they spent COVID lockdown with their two young children and Tucci’s three older ones. He details how the two fell in love over food—plucking pheasants, cooking suckling pigs, roasting potatoes—and includes a reproduction of their lavish wedding menu.

Tucci also weaves his love of the entertainment industry—film and television, in particular—with his love for food. He admits that he watched cooking shows as a child with his mother, partly because it allowed them to spend time together. Julia Child and Keith Boyd were particular favorites, and the influence of the latter can be seen in Tucci’s current series, Searching for Italy. He provides representative recipes from the North, Middle, and South of Italy that are covered in the program. He also discusses his work on his well-respected film, Big Night, his role as Paul Child in Julie & Julia, his joy at meeting Marcello Mastroianni, and the highlights of on-set catering throughout his career.

He includes an entire chapter on the Martini (always capitalized, so pertinent is its significance) and another on seafood stew and the sea. He carefully provides origin stories for his favorite dishes; praises chefs and restauranteurs who pursue good food with great gusto; and mourns the loss of specialized shops and independent enterprises to the forces of capitalist expansion. However, he saves his most momentous struggle for the final chapter: he is diagnosed with oral cancer and undergoes a brutal series of targeted radiation and chemotherapy treatments. These leave him without the ability to taste, then without the ability to eat at all—he must get his nourishment through a feeding tube for a time.

Triumphantly, however, Tucci overcomes his battle with cancer. Within a couple of years, he is able to eat—even more than before, as it appears that the treatments reset his system. His food allergies of yore have been vanquished alongside the cancer. He recalls his realization of how important food is to him: “Food was not just a huge part of my life; it basically was my life. Food at once grounded me and took me to other places” (277). He ends the chapter with a long and lovingly curated list of all the foods he now can eat: “But the most important thing is, I can finally taste it all. All of it. All of that food glorious food” (280).