I’ve had a soft spot for actor Stanley Tucci since his brief stint on ER, though I was aware of him before that. His food-and-travel TV show Searching for Italy is a true delight, a relentlessly positive journey around the gastronomic delights of probably my favourite cuisine, with the gorgeous backdrop of Italy’s stunning scenery.

Between making series one and two, Tucci wrote a memoir – Taste: My Life Through Food. As the title suggests, he tells his life story through memories of meals, foods, cooking and eating. Despite his fame and years of worldwide travel, family and home seem to be hugely important to Tucci – and central to both, for him, is food.

He says this emphasis on food is a legacy of his Italian heritage. It certainly sounds like his childhood home was filled with food far more delicious – and healthy – than his school friends’. A year of his youth was spent in Italy, a revelation of new foods and ingredients.

“Compared to the abject poverty of the Italian south, America held for [Tucci’s Italian immigrant family] everything Italy could not offer or would not allow…In America they worked together, grew together, and sometimes grew apart together. Food was the connective tissue that brought them, again and again, into each other’s homes, backyards, front porches, campsites, beaches and hearts.”

As a struggling young actor in New York City Tucci paid rent by working in restaurants (as well as frequenting many cheap eateries whose loss he laments at length). This experience inspired him to write his first screenplay about a pair of Italian immigrant brothers running a restaurant in 1950s America. He spent years on the project – which eventually became the charming film Big Night – befriending a couple of top chefs to fill in more details about the restaurant business, and to teach him how to be a convincing chef on screen.

Tucci neither dwells on the death of his first wife, Kate, nor skips over it. He speaks of their life together; introducing her to his family and vice versa; becoming a step parent and having more children with Kate. But he is careful to also drop in mentions of his current wife Felicity at intervals before he reaches the chapters about their relationship. It’s a sweet and noble gesture.

Dotted throughout the narrative are recipes, written with humorous flourishes. So many of them sounded delicious that I found myself bookmarking almost all of them, before remembering that I’d borrowed this book from a friend and would have to photograph the pages if I want to refer back to them. I will absolutely be trying my hand at the pizzoccheri (ingredients include “a fuck of a lot of butter”) and, though it’s more ambitious, I’d like to make his fish stew. I will not be following the recipe for timpano – the enormous concoction of meat, vegetables and pasta cooked in dough made for feasts such as Christmas. Even Tucci’s humour and warm memories failed to make it sound appealing.

What I hadn’t realised before reading this memoir – though Tucci has discussed it openly since starting promotion for this book in late 2021 – is that in 2018 he was diagnosed with oral cancer. After the tumour was removed and treatment successfully eradicated the cancer, Tucci was devastated by the loss of his sense of taste, and his ability to eat certain foods because they caused blisters in his mouth. Food – his great pleasure – had become a painful trial.

Slowly, Tucci’s mouth healed and food became a greater pleasure than ever – a more heartfelt emotional pleasure. Understandably. This led to him pitching the idea for Searching for Italy to CNN. Sadly, in December CNN cancelled all its original programming including this one. But I and many others hope that Tucci and his production team manage to find another network to take it on.

Published 2021 by Gallery Books in the US, Fig Tree in the UK.