If you enjoy reading about mouth-watering food with a generous sprinkling of celebrity gossip and recipes, then Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci is the book for you. Best known for years as a notable American actor, Tucci is becoming as well-known for his love and knowledge of food. Taste further opens the door to that in the form of a memoir that probably includes more food than facts about his life.
Before reading Taste, I’d already watched Searching for Italy, the documentary series where Tucci explores different regions of Italy, tasting (and always loving) the local specialities. So the Italian flavour of Taste was no surprise. The actor was born into an Italian-American family and grew up in Katonah, New York. His grandparents on both sides emigrated to the US from Calabria.
The early part of Taste explores some of this childhood, including an entertaining recounting of a typical conversation between his mother and grandmother. He also recalls trips to the Hudson River to catch crabs with his grandparents, who chose to ignore its pollution and were never the worse for it.
In 1973, the family moved to Italy for a year as his father, an art teacher, took a sabbatical to study in Florence. This was a life-changing experience for Tucci, who ate in restaurants for the first time, discovered delicious Italian snacks and attended a feast with his huge extended family in Calabria, where they ate a goat that he’d been involved in collecting from a goatherd at the top of the mountain.
Taste meanders on through Tucci’s life, but the details of it are relatively sparse for a memoir. The focus is much more on his growing obsession with food, and reading some of the mouth-watering descriptions left me salivating. And it’s not just Italian food. As I’m visiting Iceland soon, I was interested in a section where Tucci’s perceptions of the food he’ll have there are completely turned on their head.
There’s mention, of course, of the actor’s two wives, five children and two step-children. Very sadly, his first wife Kate passed away from cancer when their three children were young. He met his second wife, literary agent Felicity Blunt, at her actress sister Emily Blunt’s wedding to John Krasinski, which took place at George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como. Yes, that’s some serious name-dropping in one sentence!
Celebrity mentions in Taste are inevitable given the author’s day job, but they don’t feel gratuitous and always add rather than detract from the storytelling. Because Tucci is a good teller of tales, particularly when they involve his favourite subject, food. His tone is light and easy to read, even when he opens up about the cancerous tumour that was discovered at the base of his tongue. His chemotherapy treatment was tough and meant that he was fed via a tube for six months. An awful outcome for someone who adores food, particularly as it was a lot longer than that before his taste buds functioned properly again.
Thank goodness they did, as without them this book probably wouldn’t have been written, and I thoroughly enjoyed Taste, devouring it in only a few sittings. My only advice is not to read it with an empty stomach, or it won’t be long before you’re putting down the book and heading to the kitchen.
I borrowed Taste from a friend who’s kindly agreed that I can now donate it to the local Oxfam shop where I’m a book volunteer. You might find it in your local Oxfam shop or library, or you could try Oxfam’s online store.
For more book reviews, visit the Books section of my blog.