For a recent issue of the National Review magazine, I reviewed Stanley Tucci’s new memoir Taste: My Life through Food. I have to recommend my review especially to anyone who’s looking for a reason to get a new book, because several people have told me they finished my review and immediately bought the book for themselves or a loved one — I think when a reviewer loves a book, you can really tell.
I opened my review with this observation: “I occasionally joke that, when I’m with the Italian side of my extended family, the main thing we discuss at the dinner table is what we’re planning to eat the next day. It’s only sort of a joke.”
Over the weekend, I wished I’d had a few extra weeks to write about Tucci’s book, because I happened to come across this perfectly fitting passage in a cookbook by the late Marcella Hazan, who is often credited with being the first to teach Americans how to cook Italian food at home:
Cooking is ideal material for stories. The expression ‘cooking up a story’ is not an accidental one. The gathering and preparation of food is a tale without end, the oldest one in the memory of our race, perhaps the first use to which language may have been put at that prehistoric campfire. In Italy, when people meet and enter into conversation, even strangers, what they eat and what they cook is likely to be their number one topic. Anytime I happen to overhear such exchanges, whether I am on a water bus in Venice or in a suburban train out of Rome or on the air shuttle to Sardinia, it’s a nearly sure thing that that sooner or later—and it’s almost unfailingly sooner—the talk will be about food.
It turns out that, when it comes to Italians, my experience seems to be universal. I can’t recommend Tucci’s book highly enough, and while you’re at it, check out his CNN travel show Searching for Italy, which just started its second season last night with an episode on Venice.