Taste: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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A wonderful mix of family anecdotes, the importance of food, the love of food and how we tie food memories to events, people and places.

Taste” does end in a memorable and ‘cute’ way rounding out the text and going full-circle to the beginning of the piece. The change of seasons allows for a change in one’s wardrobe (I’m sartorially obsessed) and, most important, one’s diet. When we lived in Florence we never could get used to the unsalted bread, which we found dry and tasteless. A piece of homemade bread was buttered and then used to slather the salted ear of corn, thus, in true Italian fashion, creating two dishes out of one, the ear of corn being the first dish and the homemade bread (now saturated with the melted butter, salt, and sweetness from the buttered kernels) being the second.

Why, she may think wildly, will he not treat me to spaghetti con le zucchine alla Nerano at La Scoglio on the Amalfi coast? He also talks about his acclaimed film Big Night and all the myriad influences that ultimately led to the production of the movie.

I love to cook, though I couldn't believe the amount of food he could eat, especially when he was younger. There’s just something about a quality character actor - someone who can convince you they are ANYONE - and Tucci is one of the best. A good reader friend pointed out that this was probably anxiety, and not just a guy avoiding the prognosis. Her cooking, like that of any great cook or chef, is proof culinary creativity may be the most perfect art form.

And no less a heartthrob than Ryan Reynolds accompanies him to the extraction of his feeding tube, a procedure nearly botched because the physician is mooning over Reynolds. You get to see Stanley Tucci as the charismatic actor you know from the screen in just a few passages. During Lockdown, he went viral with his cocktail recipes and is now on TV shows about travel and food and Taste is his first memoir. Just when his persnicketiness starts to grate, he shares a story - or a recipe - that makes me love him again. There are so many descriptions of various restaurants, catering, various places, and so many unimportant details, that it clogged the book entirely.

The reader feels invited to Tucci’s table for great food and great conversations, all of this accomplished through humour, charm, sensitivity and sincerity. But I’d be just as happy to bring him home, only to marvel at the way he fills a room with style and grace and good smells. In this book, Tucci shared memories of growing up in an Italian family that shared an immense love of food, and how his preferences were much more expansive than those of his peers, yet he still craved the junk foods of his youth. There’s also something about Italian food and as a batch of German/Swedes my family has been blessed to have been “adopted” by a group of traditional Italians and experienced the magnificence of Sunday gravy, a metric ton of wedding cookies, homemade bruschetta, Thanksgiving dinner that comes with meat dressing and so many other culinary delights.He's that handsome, bald, Italian-American guy, with the devilish smirk, who you just know he's thinking about something good. Taste isn't really a cookbook but recipes are available as part of Tucci's journey from his childhood, his family, his work, and travels. I kept wishing he’d teased out more themes — beyond, simply, his gusto — to tie together his days as an Italian-American boy whose lunchbox shamed his classmates’ and his international jaunts as a movie star who judges locations based on the quality of food in and around the set. There were many surprises along the way, which I will not share since they should be discovered as he intends in the body of the work. To me, eating well is not just about what tastes good but about the connections that are made through the food itself.

He has directed five films and appeared in over seventy films, countless television shows, and a dozen plays on and off Broadway. One thing I remember about the first time I viewed Big Night was needing to exit the theater and make a beeline to North Beach, noted as San Francisco's Italian restaurant district. There are a few recipes scattered throughout the text from drink standards to elaborate holiday dishes like Timpano, but this is not a cookbook. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time. An Armagnac is the perfect complement to a snowy night by the fire but not to an August beach outing, just as a crisp Orvieto served with spaghetti con vongole is ideal “al fresco” on a sunny summer afternoon but not nearly as satisfying when eaten indoors on a cold winter’s night.Delicious food, passed from generation to generation, whose original roots date back centuries to peasant farmers. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed watching Stanley Tucci act in movies and in television programs, so I was happy when he published his memoir!