Describing Stanley Tucci wife, Felicity Blunt, cooking roast potatoes and complete confusion when they watch her boiling, fluffing them up and covering in goose fat. Incredibly vague name of red sauce or even, Gravy”. Do not call sauce, gravy. Gravy is completely different and what Brits use over our Sunday roast Dinners.

We travel to Italy when the Lira was still used and his family lived there for a short time before returning to the USA for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 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 The sharing of recipes. The friendships and bonding that occur over shared meals. The conversations. The moments you will never forget.

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The tone of his book is light and, for an American actor, moderately ironic (I should know; I’ve interviewed enough of them). Even when he’s undergoing chemotherapy – in 2017, a tumour was discovered at the base of his tongue, the treatment for which meant that, for a time, he was fed via a tube – he doesn’t get Oscar-speech mushy. But this only serves to emphasise the pulsing desire one scents in the melted butter he likes to dribble over his Maine lobster, in the wonton soup and fried plantains at Caridad, a now defunct Cuban-Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side. Separate him from his schiacciata (a bread similar to focaccia) or his chimichurri sauce, and no good will come of it; he’s one of those people who thinks about dinner even as he butters his toast. Allow him free rein, on the other hand, and there will be fireworks – or at any rate, something good to eat when you arrive home from work feeling as though you could devour a ranch. He's sexy, sensitive, and he can cook, well! He has a tiny bit of machismo, I'll explain later, but it doesn't really surface often. Most remember him from, 'The Devil wears Prada,' and 'Julie and Julia' both with Meryl Streep. My favorite is, 'Big Night' which is a great segue to Taste. 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

In Taste by Stanley Tucci, we get a nostalgic sample into Italian-American life. You feel like you’re at the Tucci family table through his admiration for his mother’s cooking, his father’s Friday night recipes and his stories of neighbours and friends praising the meals that they could never replicate. 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. Filming in the UK, and later moving to (and currently living in) London, Tucci describes a some food in the UK as such: We are glad you made it Stanley, and we love you. Your book is wonderful, and I highly recommend it.

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But after a while, it ceases to matter that he’s no Robert Evans, nor even a David Niven. The mind clings, like a good sauce, to other things. The fact that Tucci finds his wife’s greediness sexy and endearing – and that she, in turn, felt no need to hide this part of herself on their early dates, chasing after a restaurant cheese trolley with her eyes as if it were the last train home and she was about to miss it – makes me very happy. I’m not even being facetious when I say that, if we’re serious about ending cultural sexism, a good place to start might be right here. The world needs more men like this: the kind of bloke – and a Hollywood star, to boot – who could not be more delighted when a woman asks for seconds; who cooks for a girl like he really means it.