Taste: My Life Through Food

Tucci’s parents are portrayed as loving and passionate people, and Tucci remains very close to them (they lived with him in a rented house in England for a time, where his mother did much of the cooking). As a young boy, Tucci cherished attention from his mother, and they bonded over food television: “My mother tuned in to The French Chef religiously, and I remember watching with her and loving it” (123). This was also something that the two of them shared together, precious time for a working mother of three children. Joan is also portrayed as an adventurous and talented cook—making paella and chili con carne along with traditional Italian dishes. Tucci implies that she very well knows it, too. When Tucci’s first wife, Kate, tries to master the delicate besciamella for Joan’s lasagna, she helps out: “My mother is very patient and encouraging when teaching people how to cook, but because of her knowledge, experience, and prowess she can be a bit intimidating” (93). When Kate finally perfects the recipe, Joan’s response is to cry: “‘I have nothing left to teach you,’” she says (93). Clearly, Tucci comes by his passion honestly.

Tucci’s father is an ardent eater, and Tucci models his appetites and hosting instincts on those of his father. Tucci writes, in the prelude to the main narrative, about his father’s love for cocktails and his desire to make one for others: “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” (8). The elder Stanley employs colorful “food-related expressions” (15), some of them a bit too irreverent to reproduce here (Tucci truly is the apple not fallen far from the tree). Tucci’s father is also an artist, teaching at the local high school and crafting works himself. He, too, can be quite funny, at least in Tucci’s retelling of certain family lore: “I have it on good authority that when my parents were engaged, my father was present at one of these intimate eviscerations”—of one of the Tropiano’s goats (34). Apparently, the knife was dull, and the execution was brutal; Stanley Senior passed out at the sight: “Seeing her future son-in-law prostrate on the floor, my grandmother turned to her daughter and asked, ‘You’re going to marry him?’” (34). Yet, Tucci’s father redeems himself through his love of food, cooking meatballs and other delights for the family each Friday and enjoying his wife’s food with gusto.

Tucci’s maternal grandparents had an enormous influence on his early years. Their house—especially that magical basement filled with homemade sauce and charcuterie, not to mention grandpa’s wine press—was a temple to all things gastronomic and a place in which Tucci learns about hard work and thrift. He describes his grandmother, Concetta, as “one of the funniest and most generous people I’ve ever met” (27). Of course, she is also a phenomenal cook—where else would one expect Tucci’s mother learned it?—and spends much of her time bottling sauce, making homemade pizza dough, and preserving the fruits of her many labors. Tucci describes the bounty: “The bottles [of red sauce] would be stored in the wine cellar on wooden shelves alongside mason jars containing pickled green tomatoes, or roasted peppers suspended in olive oil, flavored with salt and a single clove of garlic” (31). These “treasures” would all be homemade, to be enjoyed with “small homemade salami and waxy, pear-shaped bulbs of provolone cheese” dangling from the rafters above (31). Notably, Tucci describes his grandparents via the memory of their pantry; it symbolizes not only hard work and frugality but also, quite simply, edible love.

Indeed, his grandpa makes “vinified love” with his old wine press, and though the stuff is barely palatable, it is thoroughly enjoyed. Tucci has the pleasure of seeing how happy his grandpa is when they visit family back in the old country. As Tucci reminisces about that time, he realizes how complete his grandfather’s sacrifices were:

He had been raised here, been conscripted into the Italian army during the First World War, and seen action in the brutal battles in the mountains of Northern Italy, only to come back home to a poverty that precipitated his leaving to find a better life in America (58).

It is this heritage that Tucci celebrates, through recipes and through food, throughout the book. He notes about his grandfather that “[l]ike many Italian immigrants of that era, the life he led was a very simple one. A family, a steady job, and a garden were the bastions that tethered him firmly to this world and protected him from the swirling chaos of the twentieth century” (58). Tucci himself embodies the American dream, the manifestation of the possibilities provided via the roads paved by previous generations like his grandfather.