Taste: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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Z eppole are deep-fried balls of a dough made with flour and, sometimes, mashed potatoes. The sweet version, dusted with sugar, are often filled with pastry cream, like the more famous cannoli. The savoury version, favoured in Calabria, in southern Italy, may contain anchovies, and go down very well indeed with a martini, or a glass of something cold, fizzy and unforgivably expensive. Take a lot of the tomatoes, shove them into the pillowcase, and squeeze the s#*! out of them over one of the tubs so that the juice of the tomatoes oozes through the weave of the pillowcase, making it look like a relic of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. Continue until all the tomatoes are gone or until you feel like Macbeth at the end of his play. A delicious story of appetite, family and pasta. A serious amount of pasta. In this gloriously written memoir, the ever tasteful Stanley Tucci invites us to his table and feeds us all the good stuff." –Jay Rayner

Reading this book will make you more attentive to the glorious — or modest — food on your table, and to the people with whom you are privileged to share it." —Jennifer Reese, The Washington Post No, for some unknown reason, I feel more at home in the Italian Alps than I do in the brutal heat of Puglia. I like brisk autumns, snowy winters, rainy springs, and temperate summers. The change of seasons allows for a change in one’s wardrobe (I’m sartorially obsessed) and, most important, one’s diet. A boeuf carbonnade tastes a thousand times better in the last days of autumn than when it’s eighty degrees and the sun is shining. An Armagnac is the perfect complement to a snowy night by the fire but not to an August beach outing, just as a crisp Orvieto served with spaghetti con vongole is ideal “al fresco” on a sunny summer afternoon but not nearly as satisfying when eaten indoors on a cold winter’s night. One thing feeds the other. (Pun intended.) So a visit to Iceland to escape the gloom of what is known in London as “winter” was an exciting prospect. However, my greatest concern, as you can probably guess, if you’re still reading this, was the food.” I’m not sure what to say about this book. It’s definitely not what I was expecting because I was expecting so much more. Fortunately, things worked out in the end, but after two years of surgery, chemo, pain, and a long recovery.Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about growing up in Westchester, New York, preparing for and filming the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia, falling in love over dinner, and teaming up with his wife to create conversation-starting meals for their children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burnt dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.

He lists wonderful pairings of pasta and sauce because “not all wheat flour pasta works with all sauces”. This superb book... Taste enriches the reader and establishes Tucci as one of the wisest and most generous personalities of our time." — Roger Lewis, Daily Mail The sharing of recipes. The friendships and bonding that occur over shared meals. The conversations. The moments you will never forget. I had obviously seen this book around…..so when the library had it available, I thought I would chime in. It was hard for me. I’m not used to being myself; I find it uncomfortable. I didn’t want the show to be presentational, or performative, if that’s even a word. I wanted it to be casual, in a way, but specific. I wanted it to be entertaining, but also I wanted to dig a little bit deeper than one might normally. And I didn’t want to always show the good side of Italy, a country I love, because no country is perfect. Italy isn’t always sunny, and the people aren’t always happy. There’s a lot of poverty, there’s a lot of strife, there’s a huge political rift between the right and the left, not unlike America. There are those who believe that the north should be separated from the south. That’s been going on for many, many years, ever since Italy was united, in 1861. We wanted to touch on all of that, but always through the prism of food.Italy is a very small country, really, in comparison to so many, but it’s so diverse geographically. And the influences over centuries and millennia are staggering: from the Middle East and North Africa, from Spain, from Germany, from France, from Austria and Hungary, from Greece. It’s incredible. All of those cultures have influence—yes, on politics, and, yes, the genetic makeup of Italians, but on the food, too. So, the food in the Veneto, where we’re going next, is completely different than the food in Sicily, and that makes sense because of topography, but also because of who ended up there and who ended up there.