voices in food.
PORTRAITS: CHRIS TERRY, ALAMY
Stanley Tucci has just finished lunch. “An omelette-frittata kind of thing. I didn’t have much time,” he explains. Made with olive oil or, since he now lives in England, butter? I ask. “Both,” he laughs. “But if I had to choose between them, it would be olive oil.” Tucci’s love of cooking and eating is intense. In his recent memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food (Fig Tree £20), he lists the contents of his school lunch box, packed daily by his mother when he was growing up in Katonah, a town 40 miles north of Manhattan. It would usually be leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, so meatballs on Monday, chicken cutlets on Italian bread on Tuesday, a wedge of aubergine parmigiana on Wednesday and so on. These lunches were coveted by the other kids and he would sometimes swap with his friend, Ricky, who had marshmallow fluff on white bread every day.
The Tucci family have Calabrian roots, and talking about food and looking forward to food were the norm, though the Tucci children loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches just as much as pasta with rapini. There’s a lovely scene early in the memoir in which young Stanley tries to get his mum to stop watching a TV cooking show to make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The show ends and she makes him the sandwich, which he eats ravenously. “Wow, you were hungry,” she says. Stanley, mouth still full, nods and says, “What are we having for dinner?”
“When I was ill I realised just how much food meant to me. It’s domestic and creative. It anchors me — gives me safety”
Tucci already had a solid acting career when he hit the big time with Big Night in 1996, the movie he co-directed, co-wrote and starred in. It tells the story of two Italian immigrant brothers, one a chef, the other the business mind, trying to save their restaurant. It dramatises the struggle between art and commerce and became a cult classic for food lovers. I’ve seen it a dozen times, just so I can enjoy the spectacle of the timpano, a huge drum of an Italian pie filled with ragù, meatballs, eggs and pasta, being made. Once it’s turned out the brothers gaze at it, caress it, even put their ears to it as if to check its timbre. Timpano dominated every Tucci family Christmas as his parents spent an entire day making it. It requires dedication.