What I Ate in One Year

September 15, 2024
A few lucky people get to hang out with actor and author Stanley Tucci in real life, but the rest of us can have the next best thing by joining him in the pages of this engaging chronicle of what he ate, cooked, and thought throughout the year 2023. He offers us a seat at his own dining table and in a delectable variety of restaurants, film sets, airport lounges, and even a Roman restaurant where he is served canard � l'orange by singing Carmelite nuns. Tucci's observations, delivered with a self-deprecating tone and a wicked sense of humor, begin with food and branch into thoughtful reflections on show business, work, child-rearing, travel, and marriage. As in his previous memoir, Taste (2021), readers are reminded how to live life well by a man who honors his late wife, cherishes his current one, and is devoted beyond measure to his children, his family, his friends, and his art. Ideal for readers from all walks of life who want to elevate everyday experiences by taking lessons from a master. High-Demand Backstory: Whether he's talking about food, travel, or family, fans hang on to Tucci's every word, and his literary star has only risen since releasing Taste, an instant best-seller.

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October 1, 2024
A diary of food, love, and friendship. This follow-up to Tucci's 2021 memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, is structured as a food diary, and it is the book's quotidian moments that are especially engaging, such as quiet dinners at home with his wife, Felicity Blunt; making pastina, that Italian cure-all, for his son; or rescuing wilting produce from the fridge. The actor and dapper host ofStanley Tucci: Searching for Italy is an ardent carb lover, tucking into bucatini and spaghetti with abandon. While he is well-steeped in all things Italian, we also learn that his love affair with noodles deepened after a bout with oral cancer altered his tastes. Tucci is as unfussy about his own challenges as he is about the steady rota of celebrity friends who drop in to the Tucci-Blunt household for dinner ("a home away from home for the gypsies of the celluloid world"). In addition to the recipes he sprinkles throughout the book, What I Ate in One Year doubles as a travel guide to spots he visited in 2023--Rome, London, Dublin, and elsewhere. During one such dinner, a stranger opens up to the actor about his wife's passing. Tucci, who lost his first wife, Kate, to cancer, sums up grief's evolution in these arresting words: "Because she was no longer there, he had become the conduit through which she could still experience the world and through which the world could still experience her," he writes. A charming and sometimes touching glimpse into the life of an actor and gourmand.

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Starred review from October 1, 2024

Tucci (Taste: My Life Through Food) is an actor, writer, director, and producer, but his favorite role may be in the kitchen. This tasty book, which is both a celebrity memoir and a culinary memoir, begins with an epigraph by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." In the pages that follow, readers get to know Tucci the man through his chronicle of a year's worth of menus, meals, and, of course, recipes. The book is laid out like a chronological diary, with each entry beginning with the day's date. Tucci's credo is that "sharing food is one of the purest human acts," which informs his accounts of meals with friends, family, coworkers (many of them actors of renown), and others. Tucci's stories of food, life, and food as life take place in restaurants in the United States and abroad, his home base of London, and the locations of various film projects. The book's recipes are written clearly and will give readers hope that they too can do this. Tucci's writing is heartfelt, and his observations are insightful. VERDICT A delicious serving of Tucci's special blend of tasteful prose and sparkling wit that his fans and general foodies will savor.--Carolyn M. Mulac

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