Medium well

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This article was published 09/11/2024 (419 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stanley Tucci has been having a moment.

Not only is he currently onscreen in the papal drama Conclave, his Instagram account has 41/2 million followers who tune in to watch the bald, bespectacled, always dapper American actor make Negronis, grill a piece of meat or pick red currants.

The New York-born character actor first made a name for himself on stage and screen in the 1980s and ’90s, and starred in such films as Big Night, The Lovely Bones and The Devil Wears Prada.

In more recent years, the Italian-American has focused more on his love of the culinary world. He’s got a cookware line. He’s the face of San Pellegrino sparkling water. He hosted the Emmy-winning CNN food/travel show Searching for Italy; and NatGeo will soon air a continuation of the series called Tucci: The Heart of Italy. He has two cookbooks under his belt, and a previous non-fiction offering, Taste.

His latest book, however, with the very on-the-nose title of What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts) smacks a bit of trying to ride this wave of popularity: one entry, May 22, is just an ode to eggs (albeit an entertaining and oddly touching one).

The book is formatted and written like a diary, taking us through an almost-daily recounting of the actor’s many, many home-cooked meals (the amount of pasta consumed is staggering), as well as what he made for his pickier children or consumed in restaurants — both Michelin-starred and, as he puts it, “gross.”

He often delves into the history of the dishes, their connection to the land and importance for family, but it really is a slice-of-life affair. He includes very quotidian events recounted without much fanfare — detailing his workouts, market visits, marital spats — and then some envy-inducing days, dining in Rome with Conclave co-star Ralph Fiennes or at home with Woody Harrelson.

The name-dropping can be forgiven and even enjoyed; after all, this is a man who has made movies with some of the biggest celebs in the world. It’s fun to live vicariously through his recollections of dinners with famous friends.

In the “other related thoughts” department, Tucci, 61 — whose wife Felicity Blunt is 19 years his junior — poignantly muses about mortality between the mortadella and mozzarella. His first wife Kathryn Spath died of cancer in 2009, and his own tongue cancer (now in remission) has left him unable to enjoy spicy food or things that are difficult to chew.

The actor is also a witty observer of the routine of being a dad to kids who care not one whit about his celebrity. One morning, before heading out to an event at Buckingham Palace, he is “wrangling” his five- and eight-year-olds, trying to fit the former into her school uniform while the latter “wanders around the kitchen, half-undressed, face smeared with jam, repeatedly asking me to watch him throw a tiny javelin he’s fashioned out of a stick…”

Other times, he is irritatingly oblivious to the benefits afforded him by his privilege. He spends far too much time complaining about air travel; to bemoan the quality of the buffets in first-class lounges when the rest of us are relegated to shrink-wrapped sandwiches of dubious origin is pretty myopic.

The book is also in need of a vigorous edit. Tucci falls back on the same descriptive phrases; in one instance, facing pages each contain the phrase “the food left a lot to be desired.”

But Tucci’s love of food — not just the eating of it, but sharing it with loved ones — shines through. He’s happy scarfing a bowl of cold pasta over the sink, but he’s ecstatic to host a dinner party (just don’t dare come early, as Sam Rockwell learns).

It’s that sense of hospitality that has made him the internet’s boyfriend and it’s what redeems a book that, while a breezy read with plenty of charm (and some good-looking recipes), doesn’t have much of a point.

“Hope is hard to find, but it can often be found at a table,” he says. “And tables are easy to build.”

Jill Wilson is the Arts & Life editor of the Free Press. Like Stanley Tucci, she has an affection for egg cups.