Book Report: Taste

2. Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life through Food (2021) (1/11/24)

Upfront disclaimer: I did not finish this book, which I picked up on the recommendation of a friend.

Granted, I only made it to the 1980s, when Tucci, just out of college, was a struggling actor in New York, so he had not yet found—or been able to afford—his adult tastes, or met many of the chefs and other food lovers he no doubt goes on to mention later in the book.

I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn't a small-town America look at home cooking, even if much of that home cooking had a Calabrian flavor, or a (tedious) tour of 1980s New York eateries (many now "sadly vanished"), or a meal-by-meal inventory of what Tucci ate as a high school student. (A lot of white bread was involved.)

So when, on page 85, I followed his instruction to "Please go on YouTube and find the brilliant comic stylings of Nick Kroll and John Mulaney performing their hilarious sketches in coffee shops revolving around 'too much tuna!' Your life will be changed for the better," and found Kroll and Mulaney neither brilliant nor hilarious, I decided I'd had enough. 

My friend did, however, in her recommendation, say that I should read through page 160 and then watch Tucci's 1996 movie Big Night. Well! I love that movie, so I flipped forward to chapter 9 (page 149), which describes some of its background, including the five-and-a-half-minute single tracking shot of the making of a frittata. Followed by a frittata recipe.

The book does indeed include various recipes. Most of them very, very simple—and hardly (in my view) worth inclusion. Assuming someone reading this book already loves cooking and eating. But maybe Tucci was assuming readers would just love him? I don't know. He certainly doesn't seem like a self-aggrandizing man. Maybe his editor steered him wrong.

One exception to the "simple" rule is the Timpano, which he includes in his Christmas chapter—and also in Big Night: 

I am grateful, however, for the nudge, and will rewatch Big Night. I also really enjoyed Tucci's recent TV series Searching for Italy, which I have now learned there's a second season of—adding to my list. 

The author of The Tucci Cookbook (2012) and The Tucci Table (2014), he frequently demonstrates recipes on TikTok, as here with a recipe for minestrone. As one commenter observes, "This feels like I asked my uncle for a recipe and it was too complicated to text so he just sent me this video." There's nothing fancy about his videos, but they're pleasant to watch. Better than the book. For me, anyway.

And to wrap up (though I could go on searching out video clips of Tucci—he's just charming in his drollness, which sadly doesn't come across in writing), here he is in a Q&A about the second season of Searching for Italy and about Italy and himself generally.

No wait, I will end with a video. Here, he's interviewed about Searching, Italian filmic characters, and his bout with tongue cancer (ironically)—which he cites as one reason he wrote Taste. Thankfully, he is now cancer free, his sense of taste and smell fully restored. I'm glad.

I think it's difficult to write about food in a sustained way, or to spin an entire memoir around a single subject, and I do not fault Tucci for trying. It just wasn't my cuppa. Though that said, this book  gets high marks on Goodreads, so maybe it's yours. Different tastes!