Taste/Stanley Tucci: My Life Through Food (2021)
Stanley Tucci is a successful film actor who has made a second career of out his great interest in – and love of – food.
I first became aware of this through his TV programmes travelling to different cities and reporting on their cuisine. He develops this in his book starting with enormous praise for his grandmother from Calabria’s home cooking.
Moving onto his film career, he reports on cheap but wholesome ethnic restaurants in New York to the drab canteen cuisine on the film set.
Now successful and based in London, he reports up the definitive Spaghetti Alla Carbonara which he ate at Romano’s in Rome with Marcello Mastroanni. Often he will give the recipe, always he is the great enthusiast.
In his final chapter he drops the bombshell that a lump in his mouth turned out to be cancerous. I must confess that, as my beloved cat was poorly, I did not really want to read about the treatments so I stopped then.
One aspect of his adopted land that he prefers to his previous one is the continued existence of greengrocers and butchers to the ubiquitous supermarket where there is often little difference in taste between the cellophane and the meat it wraps.
Yesterday I visited my local greengrocers where, as ever, the proprietor’s daughter could not be more helpful and the clementines (narcots) are so sweet and succulent. The lady assistant told me that there are only six such greengrocers left in Sussex. The butchers next door is one of three left in Brighton but his home-made lamb burgers are immensely popular.
I am not sure if this review should be by Neil Rosen, our travel writer Nancy, or Daffers, but – whomever the reviewer – this is a most enjoyable read which I would recommend by audible as its narrator is Stanley Tucci himself.