Spend a Year Walkng in Stanley Tucci’s Shoes

What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci is an interesting, light, humorous, and witty read for anyone interested in cooking, good food, restaurants, acting and actors, what Tucci’s daily business and family life is like, and what the heck is going on with his wife Felicity Blunt who Tucci portrays constantly throughout the book as potentially engaging in affairs, which I’m sure is just a humorous device of some kind. You couldn’t help noticing everytime he mentions where she’s off to, there is a tongue in cheek sarcastic suggestion that other men may be involved, throughout the entire book, yet they pair beautifully in the kitchen, and he makes the point, “Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.”

Before this book I was reading Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, and struggling to get through which I didn’t expect as I’ve loved previous books he’d written. I found it very different from his books in the Thursday Murder Club series. Tucci’s book by comparison was a very enjoyable book to read, easy to engage with, and kept my attention.  

Some of Tucci’s more interesting observations about acting included, “Actors will often blame themselves for not being able to retain certain passages or scenes, but it is often the script that is to blame because the character’s thoughts don’t track. By this I mean that the character isn’t speaking naturally but instead the writer is using that character as a mouthpiece.” He later cites an anecdote about a fellow actor, “But as a famous actor once said when an assistant director apologized for making him wait in his trailer for a long period of time (I was told it was the great Richard Harris but I can’t be sure), ‘Please don’t apologize. It’s the waiting I get paid for. The acting I do for free.’ I very much agree.“ Tucci describes his own method of learning lines, “I spent the next day exercising and memorizing lines. Unless I have someone to read the lines with me, I do this with the aid of a tape recorder. I record the other actor’s lines and leave gaps for my own. And then I do it over and over and over again. Tedious but necessary. Especially as one ages. If a script is well written the lines will come easily. If not, then they don’t.”

Tucci makes many more observations about food, cooking, and restaurants. He observes this about the role of cooking on our society, “Home-cooked food strengthens our bonds when we are together, keeps us connected when we are apart, and sustains the memory of us when we have passed away.” Later he describes a visit to Dublin eateries: “Over the next two days we ate at these restaurants: Uno Mas: Really good tapas. Library Street: Just great food in a lovely room. Fish Shop: Tiny place with about ten seats, including the counter. Amazing oysters. Amazing everything. Note: Bustling. Delicious. To have five varied and wonderful meals in a row in almost any city is not easy. But in Dublin it was.” He further comment on a special Guinness tasing in Dublin, “I had drunk Guinness before in bars stateside but the taste of those two half pints in Dublin was something revelatory. I told my friend it was like drinking an eight-course meal, not because it was filling but because of the complexity of the flavors. The Guinness we drank with Yvonne on that blustery day tasted the same. Rich, deep, dark, joyful, melancholic, comforting; a flawless liquid fermented in history and myth.”

The breezy conversational style of Tucci’s culinary memoir definitely kept me reading about his love affair with cooking, his boisterous active family, personal observations about life, and what a year walking in his shoes would be like.