WHAT I ATE IN ONE YEAR

A diary of food, love, and friendship.

This follow-up to Tucci’s 2021 memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, is structured as a food diary, and it is the book’s quotidian moments that are especially engaging, such as quiet dinners at home with his wife, Felicity Blunt; making pastina, that Italian cure-all, for his son; or rescuing wilting produce from the fridge. The actor and dapper host of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy is an ardent carb lover, tucking into bucatini and spaghetti with abandon. While he is well-steeped in all things Italian, we also learn that his love affair with noodles deepened after a bout with oral cancer altered his tastes. Tucci is as unfussy about his own challenges as he is about the steady rota of celebrity friends who drop in to the Tucci-Blunt household for dinner (“a home away from home for the gypsies of the celluloid world”). In addition to the recipes he sprinkles throughout the book, What I Ate in One Year doubles as a travel guide to spots he visited in 2023—Rome, London, Dublin, and elsewhere. During one such dinner, a stranger opens up to the actor about his wife’s passing. Tucci, who lost his first wife, Kate, to cancer, sums up grief’s evolution in these arresting words: “Because she was no longer there, he had become the conduit through which she could still experience the world and through which the world could still experience her,” he writes.

A charming and sometimes touching glimpse into the life of an actor and gourmand.