What I Ate in One Year (and Related Thoughts)

Tucci (Taste: My Life Through Food) is an actor, writer, director, and producer, but his favorite role may be in the kitchen. This tasty book, which is both a celebrity memoir and a culinary memoir, begins with an epigraph by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.” In the pages that follow, readers get to know Tucci the man through his chronicle of a year’s worth of menus, meals, and, of course, recipes. The book is laid out like a chronological diary, with each entry beginning with the day’s date. Tucci’s credo is that “sharing food is one of the purest human acts,” which informs his accounts of meals with friends, family, coworkers (many of them actors of renown), and others. Tucci’s stories of food, life, and food as life take place in restaurants in the United States and abroad, his home base of London, and the locations of various film projects. The book’s recipes are written clearly and will give readers hope that they too can do this. Tucci’s writing is heartfelt, and his observations are insightful.