The author shares his love of food, cooking, and sharing meals in this irresistible memoir that's also filled with joys and losses, humor, and an enthusiasm for life.
I've been on an audiobook memoir kick, and Stanley Tucci's Taste is the latest love of mine on that list.
In this memoir, the charming, food-obsessed cookbook author and actor shares the stories behind his Italian-American culinary origins; his experiences starring in the food-focused movies Big Night and Julie and Julia; and varied food adventures from five-star meals to burned, inedible disasters.
In Taste, Tucci shares his enthusiasm for Italian food, cooking processes, and gustatory exploration, and he revels in what feels like an almost sacred communal sharing of food. I loved listening to his soothing voice extol the virtues of dishes that were familiar to me and many that were not--as well as listening to him relate various cooking sagas.
But Taste is also a memoir. The author shares stories of his wife and children, his first wife and her untimely death, and his own health crisis of cancer, which affected his digestion, ability to chew, and his taste--at the time, he was unsure how long-term the effects would be. Food is interwoven through all of these shared stories, and it always feels natural, never a forced construct for the sake of the book.
Listening to the author read his favorite recipes rather than reading them myself didn't leave me with the information I'd need to recreate anything, but I found it irresistible to hear Stanley Tucci calmly list ingredients, make a few corny-but-funny jokes, poke fun at himself or other cooks in his family, and relate his swirling, chopping, and estimating.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Stanley Tucci is also the author of The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table.
For more memoirs you might like, check out the Greedy Reading List Six Fascinating Memoirs to Explore. It also links to five more memoir lists, including a foodie memoir roundup!