Taste: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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Ankle deep into the first chapter, you may feel tempted to stop reading. Tucci is fastidious by nature, which can come off as snobbish, rather than discerning. I encourage you to press on. In chapter two, he shares childhood stories of his large Italian family - gardens and gift exchange battles and homemade sauce and wine making - that will be your rich reward for keeping the faith. Friday: Scrambled egg, pepper, and potato wedge. As the food budget was wearing thin by the end of the week, this was an inexpensive lunch my mother might whip up on Thursday night after a simple dinner of pasta and salad. I listen to 4-5 audiobooks a month on Audible. If you sign up here, you can get 30 days free trial on Audible which gives you 1 credit to get any Audiobook you want and access to hundreds of free material including audiobooks and podcasts. His humor is readily apparent, though he also has had his share of suffering. Ones life is never all peaches and cream and though his seems at time magical, the food he's eaten, the places he's been and the friends he has made, there is plenty of bad with the good. I speed my audiobooks up so it only took me about 4 hours of listening and I couldn’t listen fast enough and had it on at every opportunity (walking, cooking, shower, dishes, washing).

As Tucci explains in his new memoir, “ Taste: My Life Through Food,” his career has orbited the world of food and drink nearly from the start. The book is a decidedly un-Hollywood memoir that traces Tucci’s path from son (and grandson) of magnificently talented Italian American home cooks up through his most recent project, the CNN series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” in which he takes on the role of culinary tour guide. He writes that the realization that food, and not acting, is the central passion of his life came in 2017, after he was diagnosed with a form of oral cancer, the treatment for which destroyed his taste buds and left him temporarily reliant on a feeding tube. “Food not only feeds me, it enriches me,” he writes. “All of me. Mind, body, and soul.” Tucci and I spoke recently via video chat, as part of The New Yorker Festival. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, touches on the process of writing a memoir, the importance of truth in art, and why terrible meals aren’t always bad. Thursday: Veal cutlet sandwich or wedge with a small amount of butter and lettuce. This was in the days of affordable veal. As “Taste” progresses, it begins to lose some steam and the boiling pot settles (another pun!). Tucci’s tales become quite repetitive and read exactly the same: “I ate here. I liked this dish. Then I ate here with this person. I liked or hated that.” Boring! There isn’t much excitement to be shared or a thesis to these experiences. It is also at this point that Tucci begins to name drop chefs, other foodies, and his celebrity friends which are consequentially tedious and too typical Hollywood. This type of behavior is seemingly ‘below’ Tucci and has little place in “Taste” therefore weakening the essence of the memoir. Stanley Tucci puts the sexy in Sixty! He's that handsome, bald, Italian-American guy, with the devilish smirk, who you just know he's thinking about something good.Not only is this an autobiography but it’s a dip into history, cuisine of Italian-Americans and Italy, Stanley Tucci cooking, Stanley Tucci family and a glimpse into Stanley Tucci cookbook recipes. LOVED THIS!

I don’t think you can consciously say, “I’m going to remember this.” If you do, you’ll never remember. They sort of rise up as you’re writing something—suddenly, it just comes from some weird part of your brain, and you go, Oh, yes! Yes! That’s it! You’re making all these connections. There are—what’s the word I want?— anchors for things. It’s a word that my acting teacher used to use. It could be a smell, a touch, a sound, a taste. There are things, really little things, as we go through life, that we remember, and, suddenly, if we want to put pen to paper or we want to re-create something as an actor or as a painter, these images come to you. They’re embedded in your subconscious because they are significant. Why are they significant? That’s purely an individual thing. They’re not necessarily traumatic or dramatic. It could be something very simple, like a pencil that you held once, the color of the pencil, and where you were. You can then take that pencil and turn it into a whole play, or a painting, or a movie, or whatever the genesis is. I think that these little things have real significance. There are, of course, huge, traumatic experiences that have real repercussions for us. But it’s the little things, in a way, that individuate us as artists.So often I could picture Tucci with his sly wit and slightly curmudgeonly manner telling me these stories. (He loves poking fun at Meryl Streep, too.) Taste really was just an all-around fantastic reading experience that made me so hungry, and I, well, devoured it in no time. Z eppole are deep-fried balls of a dough made with flour and, sometimes, mashed potatoes. The sweet version, dusted with sugar, are often filled with pastry cream, like the more famous cannoli. The savoury version, favoured in Calabria, in southern Italy, may contain anchovies, and go down very well indeed with a martini, or a glass of something cold, fizzy and unforgivably expensive. I’d like him even more if he’d help me get ready for the Met Ball and give me that tough lovin’ I need to survive my mean boss at Runway magazine, so I can ultimately become a journalist at the New York… Before Stanley Tucci became a household name with The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games, and the perfect Negroni, he grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the recipes and into the stories behind them. Let’s move on to something more delicious. If you could eat only one food or one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?