Fans are eating up Tucci’s new book
Tucci, meet Fauci.
Fauci, Tucci.
When speaking with the suave-as-always Stanley the other week — him jumping on the phone to talk about his gastro-fabulous, just-out book, “Taste: My Life Through Food” — the conversation turned at one point to one of his more unexpected fans. A certain doctor who became ubiquitous during the pandemic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci — an Italian-American, like the actor — is so smitten it turns out he makes timpano every Christmas, based on the dish that Tucci famously cooked up in his 1990s cult film “Big Night.” Fauci loves the movie and he double-hearts the dish (one the Tucci family grew up eating on Christmas Day, basically a no-joke extravaganza of pasta, ragu, salami, various cheeses, hard-boiled egg and meatballs).
“I actually got in touch with him and sent him some cookbooks. I was so flattered!” Tucci began to tell me, adding, via caveat, “First of all, Dr. Fauci has the hardest job in America.”
For this particular celebrity gourmand, though, Fauci’s just one of the legion of fans who seemed to have multiplied exponentially for Tucci during the past year and a half. One that hit a new level in the earliest days of the lockdown when the bespectacled thespian gave a negroni lesson that went wildly viral on Instagram. And then reached an even larger post-Bourdain glow when his show “Searching for Italy” debuted on CNN (a series that merged the foodie with the personal, political and historical, all whisked with a kind of Bertolucci wanderlust). And now, this memoir, which — as its title hints — tells the story of his life via the prism of dining (in and out). The joys. The tragedies. And what he was eating whilst.
“Cooking is, in some ways, the most like the theatre in the sense that it disappears and then you have to create it again,” Tucci said, giving some of the same pangs that flow through his book (one that belongs on the shelf next to other classics of this genre, like my own personal fave, “Blood, Bones & Butter” by Gabrielle Hamilton).
“The simple sautéing of onion,” Tucci rhapsodized, when asked if there is a sound in the kitchen that takes him to another place, which then brought up memories of his maternal grandmother (one of his culinary influences) and the immersion he got in general from his Calabrian family, growing up north of Manhattan (“food, its preparation, serving, and ingestion, was the primary activity and the main topic of conversation,” he writes).
Jumping around, we talked about the four mega-wheels of cheese he opted for during his wedding to second wife Felicity Blunt (sister of Emily), eschewing the traditional cake.
We touched on the CubanChinese restaurant La Caridad 78 on the Upper West Side — an eatery that was a harbour for him during his starving actor days and the product of the many Chinese who migrated to Cuba (first to build the railways and then to escape Mao, but who found themselves migrating, yet again, to New York City during the Cuban Revolution).
We went back and forth on the pleasures of Icelandic lamb (he was, shall we say, lambstruck while shooting there), his love for the Vancouver restaurant Cioppino’s (he devotes a chapter to it in his book!) and a fascinating overview about the manner in which catering varies on set in different parts of the world (psst: Germany does the best, most magnificent breakfasts).
“Behaviour is interesting to me. That is why I am an actor,” Tucci said when considering the part in his book where he describes the way people look when they are tasting. Really tasting. “When someone really tastes something, whatever process happens in their mouth triggers a reaction in their eyes as well as the rest of their body. First, the body almost freezes, as though it were on high alert, and then people will often tilt their heads to one side … at times their eyes will lock, staring straight ahead for a moment, and then they will glance down to the left and then to the right. After all of this, they will utter a sound of approval, of disapproval, such as Mmmm, if they like it.”
Tucci, who has starred in everything from “Julie & Julia” to “The Hunger Games,” remembers his acting coach, George Morrison, telling him that audiences love to watch people eating, drinking or smoking onscreen, and that has never left him. There is just something compelling about it — not to mention, it humanizes them.
As beautiful as the writing is in “Taste,” the book takes a sinister turn in its penultimate chapter. When a book about food becomes — irony of ironies — about the absence of food. When Tucci, who was diagnosed with salivary gland cancer in 2017, had to have meals poured directly into his stomach via a feeding tube for some time.
Unsurprisingly, it changed his thinking about food in some ways and reinforced his love of it in others.
“My illness and the brutal side effects of the treatment caused me to realize that food was not just a part of my life: it basically was my life,” he writes. “Food at once grounded me and took me to other places. It comforted me and challenged me.”
Further ironies: His recovery from this cancer, and the radiation treatment, changed the way he can eat in some unanticipated ways. Firstly, it increased his metabolism (he can chow down like his 18-year-old self, he says). Secondly: It dulled some of his long-time food allergies, including an intolerance to dairy and, at times, gluten. Because of the changes in the way he digested, Tucci has been told his system was “reset,” so to speak.
He is, in other words, eating better than ever.