Tucci's "Taste"

"The Muscoot was named after the reservoir it was adjacent to, one of many reservoirs in upstate New York that supply the drinking water for New York City. Built in the 1920s, it was a narrow, dilapidated shack of a building with a floor that sloped like a perpetually keeling ship. It was dark and dingy, with a battered wooden bar and about twenty checkered tablecloth–covered tables. Cold beer on tap, Miller High Life or the like, was served in scratched glass pitchers for about $2 each. Iceberg lettuce salads were served in those small flimsy 'wooden'  patchwork bowls that still grace tables in certain diners all over America. However, regardless of the crumbling surroundings and I believe a multitude of health violations, the place did a hearty business, because the thin-crust pizza was delicious. ... My family would go to the Muscoot maybe two or three times a year as a special treat, and besides a hamburger at the Mount Kisco Friendly’s after our annual doctor’s checkup, that was my experience of dining out." (Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life Through Food, p. 50).

Stanley Tucci is an accomplished actor and director with a long list of movie and other acting credits. He also loves to eat and has written two cookbooks. His memoir, Taste, My Life Through Food, (published 2021) reflects this thought: "food was not just a huge part of my life; it basically was my life."  (p. 277). 

The book begins with descriptions of Tucci's Italian-American family and of the remarkable food prepared by his mother and grandparents, who gardened, bottled tomatoes, preserved other produce, raised chickens, went fishing in the polluted Hudson River, and more. Above all, they were very skilled cooks. Tucci's memories resemble those that have been shared by many Italian-American food writers, but he makes everything vivid by documenting just how his mother and grandmother made a number of dishes, and how his mother managed her home and family.  He also includes descriptions of his later domestic life and how he cooked and ate with his two wives (of whom the first died quite young) and many children.

Anyone who picks up this book will hope for some sort of description of what it's like to be a famous movie star. Tucci doesn't disappoint the reader. He drops lots of Hollywood stars' names -- and apologizes for it. He includes meals at lots of famous or just fabulous restaurants all over the world. But the best of the movie star description was about the catering operations that were put in place to feed the actors and workers on movie sets. The food supplied for these very high-profile people was for the most part terrible. While big budget films have big-budget high quality food available to the workers, Tucci writes less enthusiastically about the rest: 

"On most films there is one truck with a few beleaguered caterers doing their best with minimal funds to keep a cast and crew well fed and vaguely happy. The caterers, who are actually the first to arrive, at some ungodly hour, begin cooking two meals for a minimum of about fifty people every day. The quality of ingredients isn’t usually of the highest caliber, and their resources (and unfortunately often their talents) are stretched to the limit attempting to provide a variety of dishes every day for what could be up to an eight-week shoot." (pp. 160-161). 

As a lifelong fan of Julia Child -- and also of Norah Ephron -- I enjoyed reading about Tucci's feelings about playing Paul Child in the film Julie and Julia. His enthusiasm for this role connected to the fact that his mother had loved Julia Child's cooking shows on PBS, and he remembered watching them when he was a child. Besides his description of the film, Tucci also created a wonderful description of a meal at a small French restaurant in Deauville, Normandy, where he, Meryl Streep, and a few others made the extreme mistake of ordering the infamous French sausage called andouillettes. (If you don't know about this dish, you should read his description!)

The final chapters of Taste aren't as upbeat as the ones about his earlier life. A few years ago, Tucci was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer, and he had to undergo agonizing treatments that prevented him from eating, much less enjoying any food as he always did. The description is also agonizing to read, but very well presented. After relating this experience, Tucci also presented how he lived during the covid lockdowns in London, where he makes his home with his current wife and his children of various ages. Let's just say he didn't enjoy it any more than the rest of us did!

My next adventure, I hope, will be watching at least one more of Tucci's films. I loved Julie and Julia, and look forward to seeing Big Night, which somehow I missed although it's 25 years old. There are a few others that I also have missed, though I did like Tucci's role as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Just for fun, and to give you an idea of how he writes, here's Tucci's list of what he ate on any given day when he was a teenager:

Breakfast: Two or three bowls of cereal with milk, Rice Krispies or similar; two pieces of toast with butter and jam or jelly (usually Welch’s grape jelly, which is really like sweet purple aspic); some orange juice.

"Lunch: Three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread, usually Wonder, or half a loaf of Italian bread filled with veal cutlets, eggplant parmigiana, or whatever was left over from the previous night’s dinner; a piece of fruit; a packaged store-bought sweet—Twinkies or the like. 

"After-school snack: One or two American cheese or Velveeta (is it still made legally?) sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise, or three or four open-faced peanut butter sandwiches, often layered with sliced banana; a few glasses of milk; another packaged sweet; some fruit. 

"Dinner: Two or three bowls of pasta and three or four chicken or veal cutlets, or two pork chops, or two helpings of London broil (I have only ever seen this cut of beef in America. Never in London. I must find out where it got its moniker), or a lot of whatever other entrée my mother made; vegetables; green salad; dessert. 

"Late-night snack: Two of any of the aforementioned sandwiches, or a large bowl of leftover pasta, or any of the leftover entrées, probably sandwiched between two pieces of Italian bread." (p. 62-63)

It's a fun read. Thank you to all my fellow food-bloggers who recommended it.

Review © 2022 mae sander.