Title: Taste: My Life Through Food
Author: Stanley Tucci
Genre: Biography, memoir, non-fiction
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: 2021
Format: Audiobook
Length: 7 hours

Rating:

I’ve always enjoyed seeing Stanley Tucci act, but his recent forays into food through his series Searching for Italy are what made me fall in love with him. He’s so passionate about his heritage, about food, and about the connections between the two that I found the show not only fascinating and informative but entertaining and heartwarming as well.

Taste was like getting seven full hours of a combination of Searching for Italy, combined with anecdotes and personal histories that helped paint the picture of why food means so much to Tucci. Read by Tucci himself, the book is dripping with his signature humour and wit, and there were many times throughout his various stories that I found myself laughing out loud or stopping the book to relay the hilarity to my husband, an Italian chef with many of the same biases and extreme opinions about the right and wrong ways to cook and consume Italian food.

I expected this book to be entertaining, but in all honesty, it went far beyond that. There was so much heart, so much joy, and so much passion that I simply couldn’t put it down. This is one of the strongest memoirs I’ve ever read, and Tucci’s ability to seamlessly connect food to culture was so endlessly joy-inducing that I found myself immediately wanting a hard copy of this book to keep on my shelf.

The Book: Taste by Stanley Tucci

Taste is described as “a reflection on the intersection of food and life” and I don’t think there could be a more apt description. In this brilliant memoir, Tucci walks us through his early years, his career, and his present-day life through a combination of significant events and significant dishes. He highlights some of the most profound moments of his life thus far and effortlessly connects them to the various ways that food played a role or influenced these events in various ways.

Full of sharp humour and quick wit, Taste is an explorative memoir that asks, how does food influence us culturally? What role does it play in our family dynamics, in the way that we approach the people and places around us?

The Review

My goodness I loved this book. It was so full of feeling, a perfect mixture of anecdotal memoir and pseudo-cookbook. For my family, food has always played a significant role in our day-to-day. It’s the place where we all come together, what we rally around, an endless topic of conversation that sometimes evolves and sometimes just entails the rehashing of the same thing over and over, and I felt like that was reflected in Tucci’s experience as well. Perhaps it’s his Italian heritage (my husband carries many of the same intense and hilarious opinions about the right and wrong way to approach food and Italian cooking specifically), but I suspect this is an experience that is common across many cultures. I loved how Tucci used his history and stories to bring this concept of food as a means of coming together to life.

I also loved hearing this book narrated by Tucci himself. He’s smart, sharp, and incredibly witty, and it bled through his writing in such a wonderful manner. It’s not often that a book makes me genuinely laugh out loud, but I found myself doing that several times throughout this memoir, or stopping to take notes about things I wanted to tell other people later on.

If you’re in any way a foodie or a Stanley Tucci fan, I can’t recommend this book enough. It was entertaining, hunger-inducing, and wonderfully heartfelt. I didn’t expect to have such a strong reaction to this type of biography but wow, I loved this. An easy five stars for me, and a book I’ll be recommending for a long time.