Taste: My Life Through Food

Stanley Tucci stops short of declaring pasta synonymous with Italian food. Why restrict the cornucopia of choices? In his glorious Taste: My Life Through Food, the actor shares recipes and ingredients and, no less, love for his Italian-Catholic family who ventured from the region of Calabria in southern Italy and settled in Westchester NYH.

As an appreciative son, he tells how mother’s achievements play a role, revealing that her everyday dinners, like spiffed-up meat-and-two-veg, received the same dedication as her celebratory accomplishment. Time had to be a worthy commodity for special occasion dishes like the annual Christmas timpano, where the recipe demands two pages of ingredients.

Tucci’s movie roles have taken him around the world, restaurant menus supplying an insatiable quest for the best and most unexpected they offer. He has delighted in surprises like his introduction to minke whale during a two-week stay on location in Iceland where he met the challenge of minke whale presented on a plate looking like ‘crimson medallions of beef.’ The flavor, he recalls poetically, was ‘rich and deep, like a Kobe steak but more complex because it had the delicate fishiness of sushi-grade tuna.’