What I Ate in One Year

What I Ate in One Year

Both the husband and I enjoyed Stanley Tucci’s previous book, Taste, and liked watching his show Searching for Italy where he travels around Italy and cooks with people. I had my mother buy this follow up book for the husband’s birthday. However, you don’t have to have read the first one to read this one.

The book does just what it says. It is written diary-style and discusses food on most days in 2023. When the year starts he is heading to Italy to start filming Conclave. We had just seen that movie when we started reading the book so that was a nice tie-in. (I loved the movie. You should absolutely see it if you haven’t.) The husband was horrified to hear the on-set Italian catering isn’t up to the standards that you might imagine.

This isn’t just a list of what food he ate. There are discussions of who he had meals with. (Expect lots of actors and assorted famous people up to and including royalty.) He talks about why he makes the food he does. He talks about his failures in the kitchen.

He has started a line of kitchenware and needs to go promote them.

“The line has been selling like hotcakes and we are all thrilled. (I have never eaten a hotcake, nor have I ever seen anyone selling them. Maybe because they sell them so fast that they are gone before I get there.)”

He has three adult children that he had with his late wife and two young children with his current wife. He talks about the trials of trying to get the younger children to have an adventurous palate.

Here he talks about the differences he sees in how people feed children now than they did when he was younger or even than when his older children were younger.

“But like most grandparents, she has been much more willing to cater to each child’s needs for every meal than she was when my sisters and I were young. This makes sense given the fact that she had a full-time job and then came home and cooked an amazing three-course meal every night. But that is something a grandparent doesn’t do. The grandparent indulges the grandchild’s desires.
That’s one of the reasons why kids usually love going to visit them. But nowadays we often parent our children like we are their grandparents.

This throws off a familial balance that has been securely in place for generations.”

I felt this one hard. My mother indulges my brother’s kids’ culinary wants for every meal. One of them only ate macaroni and cheese. I’m not talking about a toddler. I’m talking about a twelve year old. She let that happen. I would have starved to death if I had tried that. You ate what was on the table for dinner. You didn’t make yourself another option if you didn’t like it. She certainly didn’t make you another option. I just stare at that woman like aliens have taken over her brain. Even as I kid I didn’t like meat. Did anyone care about that? No! It was my responsibility to dowse it in enough ketchup to be able to get it down my throat without tasting it. No one was making me macaroni and cheese instead.

Likewise I wouldn’t eat most of the things that Stanley Tucci eats. He wouldn’t be thrilled to cook for me so I was amused in the fall when someone brought surprise vegans to dinner at his house with an hour’s notice. The nice vegans offered to bring their own food with them. (We’ve all been there. We know we are a burden even when we aren’t surprise guests at a dinner party.) Turns out they were really famous surprise vegans who show up through the rest of the book so it must not have been too bad.

He can be pretty whiny which is amusing to read but probably would get old to live with. I am interested to see what comes of his TV show. It was canceled at the end of 2022. He spends most of 2023 trying to find a new home for it. By the end of the book there appears to be a deal with the National Geographic channel but you never know if it will fall apart again.

This book would be good for anyone who takes their food really seriously and also likes a behind the scenes look at the lives of actors.