The book started off well enough with memories of his mother in particular who cooked up a storm and growing up in an Italian American family. Many memories made me laugh because I also grew up in an Italian American family. In my family, however, my father worked two jobs to make ends meet and when things got tough, monetarily, my mom went out to work at a bank and rose in ranks as the head teller. Those were difficult times as we hardly saw our parents but my mother always, always “cooked up a storm” for her family.

BBC Sounds - Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci BBC Sounds - Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci

The walks down the west side of Manhattan in the late seventies when I was a student at John Jay college, occasionally dropping in on small, family owned restaurants that served delicious food at very inexpensive prices...and which today no longer exist because of the gentrification of that side of Manhattan.Through the wit and authenticity of Tucci’s writing, you know for sure that the book is a genuine memoir and you devour the words almost as fast as you rush to make Stanley Tucci recipes for yourself! Stanley Tucci Taste My Life Through Food – Travel Perspective

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, My Life in Five Dishes BBC World Service - The Food Chain, My Life in Five Dishes

A delicious story of appetite, family and pasta. A serious amount of pasta. In this gloriously written memoir, the ever tasteful Stanley Tucci invites us to his table and feeds us all the good stuff." –Jay Rayner

Boil them for a while. (I can’t remember what the health ruling is on this so/and/but I take no responsibility for any foodborne illnesses). 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.

Taste by Stanley Tucci | Waterstones Taste by Stanley Tucci | Waterstones

There are lots of gaps. We get the childhood in Katonah, New York (the son of a high-school art teacher, his grandparents emigrated to the US from Calabria), but little about his efforts to win an Equity card (maybe he was too poor to eat then). His two marriages are touched on only lightly (his first wife, Kathryn, died of cancer in 2009; his second – whom he met at her sister’s wedding, at George Clooney’s “gorgeous” house in Lake Como – is the literary agent, Felicity Blunt). There isn’t much… gossip, unless you count the (non) revelation that Marcello Mastroianni, with whom Tucci once had dinner, favoured a digestivo comprising half a shot of amaro and half a shot of Fernet-Branca.

Diaries & Calendars

From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen. Who is the author? Stanley Tucci is an Italian-American actor, director, cookbook author, writer, and self-declared food lover. When he’s not gracing our screen in movies like The Devil Wears Prada or Julie & Julia, he can be found exploring the varied landscape and cuisine of Italy in his latest award-winning television venture, Searching for Italy. Also absent from “Taste” is a section of photo color plates that seems to be the usual stylistic formula for celebrity memoirs. Although this isn’t a hugely tragic departure; it would have been nice. 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.