Taste: My Life Through Food

Stanley Tucci

Taste

My Life Through Food

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To my incredible parents, for giving me and my sisters so much and for teaching me how and why to love life and food.

To my wife, Felicity, for her extraordinary mind, her open heart, and her appetite.

And to my gorgeous children, may they always find happiness wherever they are, especially at the table.

An Introduction

I grew up in an Italian family that, not unusually, put great import on food. My mother’s cooking was extraordinary and there was a daily, almost obsessive focus on the quality of the ingredients, their careful preparation, the passing on of family recipes, and cultural culinary traditions. About twenty-five years ago I made a film called Big Night that told the story of two Italian brothers struggling to keep their restaurant going. It ended up heightening my interest in all things culinary and catapulted me into places, relationships, and experiences I never thought I would have. To this day, restaurateurs, chefs, and food lovers all around the world tell me how much they like and are inspired by the film. I am more than flattered and almost embarrassed by their kind words and, in the case of many, their generosity. I am always thrilled and thankful for such moments, as I so admire anyone who runs a good restaurant, decides to lead the grueling life of a chef, or simply takes the time and effort to make a good meal for people they love.

My love of food and all that it encompasses only continues to grow every year. It has led me to write cookbooks, become involved in food-related charities, make a documentary series, and it is ultimately what brought my wife, Felicity, and me together.

As it is fair to say that I now probably spend more time thinking about and focusing on food than I do on acting, as is evidenced by some of my recent performances, it seems appropriate that this primary passion take yet another form: that of a memoir of sorts. The following pages offer a taste of such a memoir. I hope you find them palatable. (More puns to follow.)

S. Tucci

London, 2021

Westchester County, New York, Mid-1960s

My mother and I are sitting on the floor in our small living room. I am around six years old. I am playing with a set of blocks and my mother is ironing. The TV is tuned to a cooking show.

ME: What is she doing?

MY MOTHER: She’s cooking.

ME: What?

MY MOTHER: She’s cooking.

ME: I know. I mean… what is she cooking?

MY MOTHER: Oh, she’s cooking a duck.

ME: A duck?!!

MY MOTHER: Yep.

ME: From a pond?

MY MOTHER: I guess so. I don’t know.

I am silent. I build; she irons.

MY MOTHER: How are you feeling?

ME: I think, better.

She feels my forehead.

MY MOTHER: Well, I think your fever’s gone down.

ME: Will I have to go to school tomorrow?

MY MOTHER: We’ll see.

A silence as we watch the TV.

MY MOTHER: Are you hungry?

I nod.

MY MOTHER: What would you like?

ME: I don’t know.

MY MOTHER: A sandwich?

I offer no response.

MY MOTHER: Would you like a sandwich?

ME: Ummm…

MY MOTHER: How about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

ME: Ummmm… yeah.

My mother raises her eyebrows. I notice.

ME: Yes, please.

MY MOTHER: Okay. When the show is over in ten minutes I will make you a sandwich.

ME: But I’m hungry now.

My mother just looks at me, eyebrows raised even higher. I go back to my blocks.

MY MOTHER: Do you remember that show when she made crepes?

ME: What?

MY MOTHER: Crepes. Those pancakes.

ME: Ummmm…

MY MOTHER: That I make sometimes…

ME: I don’t know.

MY MOTHER: Well, anyway, do you want to help me make them this weekend?

ME: Ummm, sure.

A beat.

ME: Why is she cooking a duck?

MY MOTHER: I guess she likes duck.

A silence. We watch the television.

ME: Do you like duck?

MY MOTHER: I’ve never really had it.

A beat.

ME: Do I like duck?

MY MOTHER: I don’t know. Do you?

ME: Have I had it?

MY MOTHER: No.

ME: Then I probably don’t like it.

MY MOTHER: You can’t know if you don’t like something if you haven’t had it. You have to try it. You have to try everything.

ME: Mmm. Maybe later. Someday, when I’m older, maybe.

I watch the TV. My mother looks at me and can’t help but smile. A silence. The show ends and we go to the kitchen.

She makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for me, which I eat ravenously. She watches.

MY MOTHER: Wow, you were hungry.

I nod with a mouth full of food and then speak, mouth still full.

ME: What are we having for dinner?

MY MOTHER: Pork chops.

ME: Awwwww!!! No. I don’t like pork chops.

My mother sighs.

MY MOTHER: Well, why don’t you go next door and see what the neighbors are having?

I sigh dramatically and continue eating the sandwich. My mother smiles and begins to clean the kitchen.

What Can I Get You to Drink?

This question was asked by my father immediately upon any guest’s arrival in our home. He loved—and still, at age ninety-one, does love—a good cocktail. He’s never gone in for anything fancy, but our home always had a very well-stocked bar that contained the necessary liquors for any drink a guest requested. My father himself usually just drank scotch on the rocks in the fall and winter, gin and tonics or beer in the summer, and of course wine with every meal no matter what the season. I loved to watch him make a drink for our guests, and when I came of age, this task was passed on to me and I proudly accepted it.

Today, I also ask the same question when guests cross my threshold and take great joy in mixing up whatever tipple floats their boat. I also make one for myself every evening. What form it might take differs with the seasons and my temperament. Sometimes it’s a Martini, other times a vodka tonic, on occasion a cold sake, a whiskey sour, or a simple scotch on the rocks, and so on and so on. This past year I began a relationship with a Negroni and I am happy to say it’s going very well.

Here’s how I make one.

A Negroni—Up

– SERVES 1 –

50 milliliters gin

25 milliliters Campari

25 milliliters good sweet vermouth

Ice

1 orange slice

Pour all the booze into a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

Shake it well.

Strain it into a coupe.

Garnish with a slice of orange.

Sit down.

Drink it.

The sun is now in your stomach.

(There are those who consider serving this cocktail straight up to be an act of spirituous heresy. But they needn’t get so upset. I never planned on inviting them to my home anyway.)

1

I grew up in Katonah, New York, a beautiful town about sixty miles north of Manhattan. We moved there when I was three years of age from Peekskill, New York, a small city with a large Italian population on the Hudson River where my father’s family had settled after emigrating from Calabria. My mother’s family, also from Calabria, lived in neighboring Verplanck, a town composed of mostly Italian and Irish immigrants. My parents, Joan Tropiano and Stanley Tucci the Second, met at a picnic in 1959, and my father proposed a few months later. They married soon afterward and I was born ten months after their wedding day. Clearly they were in a hurry to breed. My sister Gina followed three years later, and my sister Christine three years after that. We lived in a three-bedroom contemporary house at the top of a hill on a cul-de-sac mostly surrounded by woods. My father was the head of the art department at a high school a few towns away, and my mother worked in the office there. My sisters and I went to our local elementary, junior high, and high schools.

In the sixties and seventies, the suburbs of northern Westchester were not nearly as densely populated as they are today and were a rather ideal place to grow up. My sisters and I had a great group of friends who lived on our road and close by with whom we played daily and almost exclusively out of doors. There were no video games or mobile phones, and television was only watched on occasion. Instead we played in each other’s yards or the nearby fields, but mostly in the surrounding woods, throughout the year. The woods had everything to offer us. Endless trees to climb and in which forts could be built, swamps to trudge through or skate on when frozen, Revolutionary War–era stone walls to climb, and hills to sled down when they were covered in the deep snow that used to fall consistently every winter.

Now that I am in the autumn of my years (I have just turned sixty, so that might be edging toward mid- to late autumn), I often wish I could return to those times, that place, and my innocent, curious, energetic self. I would also like to go back if only to retrieve my beautiful head of hair.

The carefree activities out of doors in all kinds of weather were a wonderful part of my childhood, but what was even more wonderful was what and how my family cooked and ate.

Food, its preparation, serving, and ingesting, was the primary activity and the main topic of conversation in my household growing up. My mother insists that she was capable of little more than boiling water when she married my father. If this is true, she has more than made up for this shortcoming over the last half century. I can honestly say that on the four-burner electric stove she used throughout my childhood and on the gas hob that replaced it many years later, she has never cooked a bad meal. Not once. The focus of her cooking is Italian, primarily recipes from her family or my father’s family. (However, she was never afraid to branch out into the cuisine of Northern Italy. Her risotto Milanese is still one of the best I have ever tasted.)

Over the years she also perfected a few dishes from other countries, which became staples of her repertoire. One year paella appeared, cooked and served in an elegant orange and white Dansk casserole dish. Brimming with clams, mussels, shrimp, chicken, and lobster tails (at the time lobster was somewhat affordable), it became a special treat for years to come. Crepes made their way onto our table at some point in the early 1970s, no doubt inspired by Julia Child. Light and airy, they were stuffed with chicken in a béchamel sauce and greedily devoured by us all. Rich, thick chili con carne appeared every now and again, speckled with green and red peppers, its meat made unctuous by rich red tomatoes and olive oil. This dish was often specifically made for some neighbor’s annual Super Bowl party. We never threw any such fête, as no one in the house was in any way a football fan.

It should be obvious by now that when I was young, my mother spent most of her waking time in the kitchen, and she still does to this day. Cooking for her is at once a creative outlet and a way of feeding her family well. Her cooking, like that of any great cook or chef, is proof that culinary creativity may be the most perfect art form. It allows for free personal expression like painting, musical composition, or writing and yet fulfills a most practical need: the need to eat. Edible art. What could be better?

Because of my mother’s culinary prowess, eating at neighbors’ houses as a kid was always a bit of a struggle. The meals were bland or just plain not good. However, my friends were more than happy to spend time at our table. They knew the food at our house was something quite special. The ingredients had been carefully chosen or grown according to the season; each dish had a cultural history and was lovingly made.

It was not only the food itself in which they delighted but the passion with which it was made and presented, as well as the joy our family took in its consumption. The moans of satisfaction that the meal elicited from us were enough to convince one to enjoy the meal even if one wasn’t already. Between moans there was the usual discussion of how and why it was all so delicious. The best you’ve ever made, Joan, my father would say about one dish or another every night. We, my two sisters and I, would agree as my mother would mutter something about there not being enough salt or something needing more cooking time, or saying, It’s a little dry, don’t you think? and so on.

This discourse was followed by stories of previous meals, imagined ones, or desired preferences for those to come, and before one knew it the meal had ended and little else had been discussed other than food. Politics, luckily, were quite low on the list. No matter what one ate, even if it was just cold cuts and olives from a delicatessen, it was elevated to a new level of flavor in my parents’ home. A college friend once said to me when eating prosciutto, bread, and cheese in my first apartment in New York City, Stan, how come even though I buy the same stuff from the same store, it tastes better when I’m at your house?

You should visit my parents, was my reply.

In Italian families, nothing is discussed, ruminated on, or joked about as much as food (except death, but I’ll save that subject for another book), and hence there are quite a few food-related expressions that have been passed down through my family over many generations that I continue to use to this day myself.

My father is a voracious eater, and during dinner, while savoring his food (in truth he would be eating it very quickly, as savoring is something neither he nor I practices, although I suppose we are experts in the postprandial savor), my father would inevitably utter the rhetorical question My God, what does the rest of the world eat?!!!

To me, given the quality of the food, it was a more than fair question. When he was told that dinner was soon to be served, he would take a sip of his scotch, slam the glass on the butcher-block counter, and loudly pronounce, "Buono! Perche io ho une fame che parla con Dio!"

This translates as…

Good! Because I have a hunger that speaks with God!

God has paid little attention, it seems, to truly sating him, as my father’s biblically proportioned hunger returns every evening.

When he was young, my father would, as all children do, ask the question, Mom, what’s for dinner?

His very sweet mother (sweet by all accounts, for I didn’t know her well, as I was only seven when she died) would respond with "Cazzi e patate."

This translates directly as "Dicks and potatoes. In other words, Leave me alone, or Bugger off, as the Brits might say. In today’s PC" climate, a social worker might be brought into a household to oversee parents who spoke to their children this way. One could only hope for a social worker with Italian roots.

When we were young, whenever my sisters or I complained about a certain meal my mother had lovingly made, she would suggest rather tersely that we go see what the neighbors were cooking. And that, as they say, put an end to that. The reason being, as I said, having eaten at many of our neighbors’ homes, we had no desire to revisit their tables. In our home each day of the week, a delicious and well-balanced meal appeared from the kitchen, and no matter how much we might gripe about our personal aversions to broccoli, fish, salad, or pork chops, we knew how lucky we were. Yet, for all of her posturing about insisting we go skulking about the neighborhood to sniff out a better meal when we complained about hers, my mother was very well aware of our individual likes and dislikes and she did her best to make, if not a main dish, then a couple of side dishes every night that satisfied everyone. A typical meal might consist of a bowl of pasta with broccoli, breaded veal cutlets with sautéed zucchine on the side, and a green salad. Within that array of dishes there was something for all of us. My sister Christine loved meat, Gina preferred pasta and vegetables, and I ate basically everything that wasn’t nailed down. The next night’s fare might be chicken alla cacciatore, with a side of rice, sautéed escarole, and cabbage salad, and so on and so on. How my mother turned out these amazing, diverse, healthy meals night after night while having a full-time job is beyond me.

By the time Friday rolled around, the household budget had been stretched to its limit, relegating end-of-the-week meals to simple, inexpensive fare. However, given the innate Italian facility to create something substantial out of practically nothing, we hardly suffered. Fridays were often also the only night when my father would cook, in order to give my mother a much-needed rest. She in turn became the sous-chef, facilitating as necessary. A usual Friday night dinner would be one of a handful of dishes that my father was most comfortable preparing. The simplest and most often prepared was pasta con aglio e olio (pasta with garlic and olive oil).

Here it is:

Pasta con Aglio e Olio

– SERVES 4 —

3 garlic cloves, cut into thirds

¼ cup olive oil

1 pound spaghetti

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Paprika

Sauté the garlic in the olive oil until lightly browned.

Boil the spaghetti until it’s al dente.

Drain the spaghetti and toss with the oil and garlic mixture.

Add salt, pepper, and paprika to taste.

Cheese is not allowed.

My father’s second go-to Friday night dish was uova fra diavolo. For egg-obsessed people, like my father and me, nothing could be as desirous as this rich, visually stunning meal. Imagine a deep frying pan of delicate red-orange marinara sauce (made with more onions than usual for extra sweetness), in which six to eight eggs are poached. The result, as its name implies, is positively sinful. This was accompanied by lightly toasted Italian bread and followed by a green salad. Here is the recipe:

Eggs with Tomato

— SERVES 2 —

¼ cup olive oil

1 medium to large onion, thinly sliced

1 cup canned whole plum tomatoes

4 large eggs

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Warm the olive oil in a medium nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the tomatoes, crushing them with your hand or the back of a slotted spoon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes have sweetened, about 20 minutes.

Gently break the eggs into the pan and cover. Decrease the heat to medium-low and cook until the whites are opaque and the yolks are moderately firm, about 5 minutes. Serve immediately, seasoned with salt and pepper to taste.

The third Friday favorite was fried meatballs. This was a meal my parents would make together, my mother preparing the meatball mixture and rolling them, and my father frying them slowly in olive oil. Many meatballs were cooked on a Friday evening, as half were to be eaten that night and the other half were to be used for the Sunday "ragù. Those eaten on Friday night were served nude," or, in other words, without any sauce at all. They were accompanied by a fresh green salad and Italian bread. It was only when this meal was served that butter made a rare appearance on our table.I

When spread on Italian bread, it was a sweet and soft complement to the crusty meatballs.II

I remember those Friday night meals with great fondness, as there was a more relaxed feeling throughout the house. The work and school week had ended, and a weekend spent with friends and the inevitable Friday or Saturday night sleepover lay ahead for me and my sisters, while my parents looked forward to dinner parties at home or away. We knew that Sunday morning’s painfully portentous Catholic mass loomed, but we were well comforted by the thought that the remaining meatballs cooked on Friday evening would be given a new and delicious life in my mother’s ragù that afternoon.

I

As butter is not a large part of the Southern Italian pantry, it was seldom seen at our table. Bread was never buttered unless it was to be eaten alone as a snack. Bread was used at meals to soak up the remaining sauce from a pasta, meat, or poultry dish. The thinking is that buttered bread only corrupts the flavors of the leftover sauce.

II

Regarding the use of bread, some argue that the Florentines make unsalted bread to this day so that it might be as neutral-tasting as possible, in order to maintain the integrity of the sauce it absorbs. Others argue that the lack of salt in Florentine bread is because unsalted bread lasts longer, or it’s the result of an innate or inherited Tuscan parsimony stemming from a time when Italy was divided into city-states and wars were fought over necessary and coveted commodities such as salt, which