Taste: My Life Through Food

Tucci is frequently at pains to point out his ordinary upbringing and down-to-earth personality, which is apparent in his nostalgia for his childhood and the warm humor he employs throughout the book. He makes gestures that assure the reader, “I’m just like you,” though he often quickly pivots to highlight his exceptionality. Hence, “I grew up in an Italian family that, not unusually, put great import on food” immediately leads to the pronouncement that his “mother’s cooking was extraordinary” (1). On the one hand, the Tucci family is an ordinary Italian American family, focused on food; on the other hand, the matriarch is extraordinary in her skills. His father, for his part, has a legendary hunger, even divinely so: he regularly shouts, when dinner is about to be served, “Good! Because I have a hunger that speaks with God!” (15). As Tucci notes, “God has paid little attention, it seems, to truly sating him, as my father’s biblically proportioned hunger returns every evening” (15). Certainly, these exaggerations are techniques—poetic license, if you will—to illustrate his beloved family with vividness and warmth. It is also a way to make his memoir legitimate; this is a unique story to which others can relate and from which others can learn—hence, the recipes and traditions described throughout the book.

Nostalgia often features heavily in these first five chapters, understandably so. He waxes lyrical about his idyllic childhood, as he lived in an “ideal place to grow up,” where “[t]he woods had everything to offer us” (12). Now that he is in his sixties, he writes, “I often wish I could return to those times, that place, and my innocent, curious, energetic self” (12), which nostalgic sentimentality he immediately undercuts with characteristic humor: “I would also like to go back if only to retrieve my beautiful head of hair” (12). Later, when discussing the culinary traditions of his nuclear family, he writes, “I remember those Friday night meals [typically, meatballs] with great fondness” (19). Of his childhood love of Independence Day, he speaks of the irony of rediscovering that joy in England many years later:

Taking part in joyous celebrations of American democracy on foreign soil made me long for a time in my youth when the sausage and peppers of Italian immigrants sat peacefully on the grill alongside their American cousins, the hot dog and the hamburger (27).

This recollection leads to another early theme of Tucci’s, that of the immigrant experience.

The reason that the Fourth of July was such a significant holiday for his family was, indeed, because of their immigrant roots: “Compared to the abject poverty of the Italian south, America held for them everything Italy could not offer or would not allow. It was in America that their dreams of a new and successful life came true” (24). Therefore, the Fourth of July—the most patriotic celebration of the year—becomes central to their gratitude, as well as to what some readers might consider rather old-fashioned notions of the melting pot: “Over these makeshift grills, the ubiquitous hamburgers and hot dogs were cooked alongside Italian sausages, a simple culinary representation of the melding of two distinctive cultures” (25). Indeed, metaphors that describe immigrant assimilation often rely on food for their symbolic currency: the aforementioned melting pot is one example, for instance, or one could look to its counterpart, the salad bowl, where cultures are not homogenized as in a stew, but layered together with their attendant qualities intact.

When talking about his maternal grandparents, Tucci also highlights the thriftiness and ingenuity of the immigrant experience. In the grandparents’ basement, homemade salami and cheese drape from the rafters; grandpa makes “vinified love” with his ancient wine press (31); and every part of the animal is consumed. He notes that “[m]y grandparents [...] knew nothing but labor” and, therefore, “[n]othing went to waste and luxuries were unheard of” (32). Further, he extrapolates from his grandparents’ experience to that of the immigrant experience, in general: “In fact, for a great many the mindset never changed. If you could grow it, raise it, hunt it, cultivate it, build it, or repair it yourself, why buy it or pay someone else to do it? Therefore backyards became microcosms of the land they had abandoned” (33). The importation of Italian tradition into American backyards echoes the sausages grilling alongside the hot dogs on Independence Day.

Tucci is also preoccupied with preservation in the face of rapid gentrification and the forces of capitalist homogenization. In the chapter on New York, he rails against what he sees as the American tendency to discard the past in favor of the new: “I don’t know why, but we Americans feel little obligation to preserve what once was because we choose to see it as less than what is or what could be. Like children and adolescents, we have not yet learned that the present isn’t the only thing” (84). The youth of America’s cultural heritage—in comparison to the long history of Europe, of Italy in particular—is a common trope against the American century. He mentions the “dozens” of venerable, often family-run restaurants in Paris versus the handful in New York (85) as proof that Americans value convenience and commodification over authenticity. The loss of the beloved Carnegie Deli is one of the primary examples of this detrimental trait. This is a discredit to the culture, he suggests, because to shutter these places “is an enormous loss for any culture no matter how you slice it” (86)—a sly pun for the thick piles of deli-sliced meats once adorning the legendary sandwiches of the Carnegie Deli.

This discussion follows upon the heels of his explanation of the history of ragù—particularly, an interest in the origins and authenticity of the famous sauce, to which he will add his family’s specific legacy in the form of a recipe. This leads to another discourse on which sauces are appropriate for which pastas. These rules are, indeed, tantamount to religious proclamations: “I am confounded that whoever made the choice (no names) does not innately know that, as per example, the combination of star pasta and a meat ragù is an act of heresy” (66, emphasis added). To counter the prevailing culinary dogma is akin to biblical transgression. A few pages later, he comments—in emphatic italics mimicking a panic attack—on the “egregious culinary crime” (73) of a full-grown adult cutting their cooked spaghetti. There are rules that, if broken, constitute criminal negligence at the least or religious profanity at the most. While the family itself is not overtly religious, Tucci employs religious metaphors and references throughout the book, reminding the reader of the Catholic influence on Italian culture: “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” (20). The meatballs would be symbolically resurrected, as the promise of food will alleviate the penance of suffering through church.

Throughout the book, Tucci employs humor to a warming effect. His personal pronouncements are exaggerated to amusing effect and often insightful. For example, when he talks about his adolescent commitment to American snack foods like Devil Dogs and Ho Hos, he notes that “[t]he names of which in retrospect seem as inappropriate as their ingredients” (22). When relaying the instructions for making homemade tomato sauce, a la Tropiano, he directs the reader to put tomatoes in a pillowcase and “squeeze the s#*! out of them [...] making it look like a relic of the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre” (30). His personal pronouncements on such things as pairing sauce with pasta and the American character also reveal his forceful personality, leavened with wit and self-deprecation, a legitimate and welcome ambassador of his family history and their food.