The Tucci Table by Stanley Tucci: Cooking with Family and Friends

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The series is a little bit to dispel myths, bring clarity, and show people that Italy is not always warm and sunny and all about the sea and tomatoes,” says Tucci, who can’t resist the red fruit, and feels more at home in the colder climate of the north.

I received my advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.That said, the celebrity-obsessed may get a thrill from inclusions like Emily's Chicken Noodle Soup (from Blunt's sister, actress Emily Blunt) or a recipe for pissaladi re from the late Natasha Richardson. The Tucci Table is full of recipes that are based on simple, quality ingredients and traditional flavors. The book emphasizes the importance of the "family table," and indeed the whole family shows up, with recipes from Tucci's children, parents, in-laws, and friends. Few actors can look so at ease or so convincingly distraught in restaurants, dining rooms, and bars on screen. So they got out the hacksaw and tried to cut off the pig's head, when their children came home from school to see the carnage.

Each recipe comes with a fun little story that introduces the people in Tucci's life, and makes you feel like you know them too. If you think about that alone— the influences over millennia, the topography, and the climate, how diverse it is from Lampedusa to the Alps — it’s just staggering. In Big Night, the film he directed as a 36-year-old, Tucci played Secondo, a frustrated Italian restaurateur in New Jersey, who serves seafood risotto to a meatball-loving clientele. Even after a lifetime of exploring Italian food, Tucci cannot name a dish he holds dearer than others, because he cannot take a recipe, chef, or province for granted, nor reduce the cuisine’s diversity to a single favorite. Food can bind and govern a family and no one knows this more than Hollywood actor and respected foodie, Stanley Tucci.Tucci is a foodie who loves a culinary get-together, and offers up warmly annotated, user-friendly recipes that reflect his Italian-American background and that of his (British) second wife Felicity Blunt. There are also lovely photographs of some pretty tasty foods, some of my favorites being emily's chicken noodle soup, potato and leek soup with fried parsley, cannellini bean and tuna salad with red onion, pasta with mushrooms, basic risotto, israeli couscous with slow-roasted tomatoes and caramelized onions, and always a favorite, fried green tomatoes.