What I Ate in One Year, by Stanley Tucci (Gallery, 348 pages)
Fame enables so much. If you or I were to propose a book in which we jot notes about what we’ve eaten over the past year, along with occasional asides about what our kids will or won’t eat, and how an airline has once again made flying unbearable, and the friends we’ve had over recently, we’d be pitched in the slush pile. But then again, our friends probably aren’t Robert Downey Jr. and Colin Firth.
And so Stanley Tucci, whose list of credits in Hollywood over the past 40 years has made him more connections than even Kevin Bacon, does get to write such a book, even though it comes on the heels of one that was much more substantial: 2021’s Taste: My Life Through Food. That book was a memoir; his latest is more a journal, and, at first glance, seems kind of scammy. Here’s an actual excerpt from page 90: “I had oatmeal in the [airport] lounge and some orange juice and a croissant. I tried the tater tot things again and they were crisper this time. … Arriving at the hotel, I ordered poached eggs, toast, and sausage, and it was delicious.”
I wish I could say that there were fascinating stories woven around those two meals, but there were not. And yet. The mind-numbing conceit of this book — a foodie records what he eats and doesn’t care whether you find it interesting or not — kind of, sort of, almost works. This is, after all, one of the most likable character actors in Hollywood, who has in recent years become associated with good eating by playing Julia Child’s husband in a film (Julie and Julia) and eating his way through Italy in a documentary (Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy). He has co-owned a restaurant and has written two other cookbooks (The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table).
Maybe he’s just run out of foodie things to say, and the publisher said just keep a journal next year and we’ll buy that. And it isn’t terrible — in fact, in places, it is poignant and heartwarming, particularly when he talks about his interactions with his aging parents. And there are a couple of short, stand-alone essays that are memorable and perfectly timed, including one in which Tucci describes a fan coming up to him in a restaurant and telling him how he used to watch Searching for Italy with his wife, who had recently passed. Tucci, who lost his first wife to breast cancer, knows about grief, and uses the occasion to write beautifully about how is it absorbed:
“It would always be there. Always. But soon, it would become less prevalent. In time her presence would slip into his body, his heart, and his thoughts, sometimes gently, sometimes joltingly, but it would never last for as long as it would today. Eventually, years from now, it would alight on the tip of his soul for just a second or two, carrying with it a shiver of the past and a glimpse of a future that might have been. And then it would disappear again.”
Also, as someone who travels broadly (though tries never to be away from home for more than two weeks at a time), Tucci has a vast and alarming knowledge of things people eat outside of American food courts. The faint of heart may need to skip over the sections about the man who poached a bucket of snakes (“one of the best cooking videos I’ve ever seen,” Tucci says), and about the Italian dish he loves that features a sauce “made with the intestine of a baby calf that is slaughtered while the mother’s milk is still inside of it.” (The name, should you wish to make sure you never accidentally eat this while you are in Rome, is pasta con pajata di vitello a latte. Personally, I’m for making it illegal.)
And on it goes. We get to know Tucci’s wife and children, as well as his parents and some of his extended family, and learn that his daughter doesn’t eat much of anything other than pasta with butter and Parmigiano cheese, which doesn’t bother him because “It has pleased picky eaters and comforted the ailing and the anxious for as long as those three ingredients have been around, which is probably pretty f—ing long. Why? Perhaps because it’s so simple it helps us focus on what is necessary: comfort and health. Eating a simple dish gives one clarity. Pasta with butter and cheese laughs in the face of our complex lives.”
Many of the recipes that Tucci shares here are similarly simple: spaghetti con tonno (with tuna), minestrone soup, and rainbow chard, for example, then he smacks us upside the head with risotto with mushrooms and rabbit legs. All the while, as we read about his trip to Williams Sonoma and a bout with Covid-19 and how he first encountered wild garlic, we are never unaware of the fact that this is a journal — ABOUT WHAT SOMEBODY ATE:
8:30 a.m.: Star pasta with butter, Parmigiano and scrambled egg
10:30 a.m.: Leftover minestrone with a piece of toast
1:30 p.m.: Toasted pita bread stuffed with sheep’s cheese, tomato, and sauteed peppers and onions.
Also, the man never stops eating, and must have the metabolism of those unlucky rabbits.
There is, mercifully, some order to the year, which was, in fact, a complete year, running from Jan. 2, 2023, to Jan. 2, 2024. But it’s difficult to find the big, crinkly bow in which to tie this journal up neatly and to say, “ah, this is why I just read a journal about what a family ate.” I still don’t really know. I learned some things, such as that the British call ground beef mince, and that I will never eat a dish in Rome that ends with a latte. But beyond that, it’s a mystery why it was written, and why I read every word. And it’s a testament to Tucci’s utter likeability that I don’t want those hours of my life back. B-
