What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci: What he cooks for his starry friends
What I Ate In One Year Stanley Tucci Fig Tree £20, 368pp
The American actor Stanley Tucci has appeared in some excellent films (Big Night, Julie & Julia, The Devil Wears Prada) and some pretty awful ones (Captain America, Space Chimps, Burlesque).
Slightly built, bald, bespectacled and in his 60s, Tucci is not an obvious heartthrob, yet he has a large and devoted following of fans who think he’s far sexier than George Clooney or Brad Pitt. During lockdown, the videos he posted of himself making cocktails caused so much excitement that he was dubbed ‘the internet’s favourite boyfriend’.
Stanley Tucci with his second wife Felicity Blunt
What makes him so appealing? Perhaps it’s because Tucci absolutely adores his parents, suffered the heartbreaking loss of his wife from cancer, has five children he dotes on and seems to approach all of life’s vicissitudes with a mixture of good cheer and ironic detachment. Most alluringly of all, he is a terrific cook and a true gourmand, who has no sooner finished one meal than he’s thinking eagerly about the next one.
His 2021 memoir, Taste, told of his happy second marriage to literary agent Felicity Blunt (sister of actress Emily Blunt), his relocation to London and his brutal battle with cancer after a tumour was discovered at the base of his tongue.
In his latest book he chronicles his acting work, his travels, his family life and, above all, everything that he cooked and ate in a year.
Tucci’s gargantuan appetite is only slightly tempered by the lingering effects of his cancer treatment, which mean he has trouble chewing meat and can’t drink very strong red wines.
He starts the year in Rome working on the film Conclave, and lamenting how unexpectedly dire Italian location catering is, with its ‘heavy-handed sauces, overcooked pastas, stringy meats.
Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada
’ Fortunately, his evening meals in Rome’s best restaurants make up for it. Not that he eats only in swanky eateries. He is especially thrilled when the owners of an unpromising-looking bar near his hotel persuade him to try their signature sandwich of ox tongue and home-made pickles. ‘I’ve never been so glad to be bullied into eating something,’ he exults.
In London with his wife and two youngest children, Tucci spends a great deal of time cooking, though to his chagrin the children’s meal of choice is pasta with the blandest of sauces – painful for a man whose idea of a speedy midweek dinner is steamed mussels in white wine with shallots and garlic, followed by spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce.
Making his own tomato sauce, he declares, is ‘grounding’.
Over a year he travels to America, Italy, France, Moldova and Ireland, seeking out good food wherever he goes. When he’s at home he and his wife host dinners for a constant stream of celebrity friends: Colin Firth (ribs and salad), Harry Styles (leek and zucchini risotto followed by cod) and Michael McIntyre (roast chicken and roast potatoes).
Other chums – such as Matt Damon, Woody Harrelson, David Tennant, Ryan Reynolds and Holly Willoughby – also make an appearance. Even King Charles is a fan. When the Italian ambassador is planning a dinner for him, HM agrees to come, ‘but only if Stanley Tucci is invited’.
There is a bit too much name-dropping, and Tucci can come across as rather too pleased with himself at times, but it’s hard not to warm to him, his hearty appetite and his new life in Britain. Beneath the urbane exterior he worries constantly about his elderly parents, mourns the loss of his first wife, Kate, and frets about the 21-year age gap between him and Felicity, fearing that ‘I am too far along in years to ever grow old with the lanky, beautiful, brilliant woman I love’.
A reason he loves good food so much, he writes, is that in the midst of his busy life it offers him perfect, uncomplicated happiness: ‘a beautiful, varied thing waiting to bring satiety and solace and offer hope, while death and arithmetic haunt me’.