Taste

 I read Stanley Tucci's book Taste: My Life Through Food. This book is his memoir and it is mostly linear through time. He starts with a story about his Italian mother arguing with her Italian mother about gifts of food. Both women want the other one to keep the food given. He grew up in New York near the Hudson valley eating home made healthy food. He and his three younger siblings ate very well. Once he got to school he ate well too but learned about Ding Dongs and Ho Hos and Hostess pies. He says he never really had a sweet tooth. He was lucky to be blessed with a fast metabolism. He could eat as much as he wanted without gaining weight. After college he moved to New York City to be an actor and for awhile money was tight. He actually had to take a loan from the Actors Guild to pay the rent. He got lucky and soon found acting jobs to pay the bills. He found certain restaurants he liked in the city and would go back time after time. He found a wife and had 3 children with her. Unfortunately his first wife died from ovarian cancer at a young age. With the help of his family he got through it. He met his second wife at the wedding of her younger sister. He ended up moving to England to be with her and to combine their families. He talked about the food on movie sets. The food at movies set in Italy was usually quite good. He went to Iceland for a film and ate the best lamb of his life. In a small town in northern France he went to a restaurant with Meryl Streep and other actors. They decided to try the local delicacy called andouillette  sausage. They assumed the sausage would be small because of the ette at the end of the name. When the sausage arrived it was huge and looked like the penis of a horse. Meryl slices off the end and takes a bite. She says it smells of the barnyard. Soon she spits it into her napkin and starts taking wine to get rid of the vile taste. Stanley takes a bite and the same thing happens to him. When the waiter comes to check on them they lie and say they like the sausage. They also order omelets and eat those instead. Stanley really enjoys eating and drinking. He once worked at a bar and learned how to mix drinks so he was pretty particular about how his drinks were made. He had two more children with his second wife. When she was pregnant with the second one he finally went to the dentist for a pain he had for six weeks. The pain turned out to be oral cancer. For a man who loves to eat and drink and cook, hearing about the chance he might loose his sense of taste was heartbreaking. He went to New York for the surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. He ate through a stomach tube for six months. He was lucky to survive and be able to eat again. Ryan Reynolds went with him when he had the stomach tube removed. The nurses were so flustered by the appearance of the handsome actor that she forgot to cut the tube to remove the bubble that held the tube in his stomach. Stanley remembered and stopped her from hurting him. Yikes! He does a lot of name dropping in his book but that makes it a charming read. I really enjoyed this one.