What I Ate In One Year

When your days speed up, what keeps you grounded? In What I Ate In One Year, Stanley Tucci argues—quietly but firmly—that food is the steadiest anchor available: a daily practice, a way to measure time, a salve for grief, a language for love, and a map for meaning. He contends that how and what you eat reveals who you are (echoing Brillat-Savarin’s epigraph), and that tracking meals across a year exposes the deeper story of a life: work and waiting, illness and recovery, friendship and family, generosity and craft.

Built as dated entries from January to December, the book reads like a culinary journal crossed with a travelogue and backstage memoir. You shadow Tucci from a spartan flat in Rome (where he’s filming Conclave) to family tables in London, the Cotswolds, and Florida; from Dublin tapas to Dingle Guinness; from a Lake Como lunch to a UNHCR field visit in Moldova; from charity dining rooms to chaotic airport lounges. The thread tying it all together: what he cooks or orders, how it tastes, the people at the table, and what those plates unlock—memories, arguments, jokes, and jolts of meaning.

A Year Measured In Meals

January opens in Rome with discomfort—an architect’s “high-concept” apartment that’s all edge and no solace, and on-set catering that’s “really. Dreadful.” The solution is simplicity: a pot of tomato sauce for the week; minestrone ferried in Tupperware to the cold soundstages of Cinecittà; humble tuna-and-bean salads and a saving espresso. Nights bring the city’s consolations: carciofi alla romana at Checchino dal 1887; the prayerful singing nuns of L’Eau Vive serving canard à l’orange; an ox-tongue sandwich at Circoletto thrust upon him by tattooed brothers too delighted to take no for an answer.

By spring he’s toggling between red carpets and rice pots: pan-searing cod alla livornese in his London kitchen one night; hyper-decanting wine in a blender with Richard Madden the next; cooking with his kids between junkets for Citadel; and sharpening his belief that restaurants should be confident and unfussy—unlike the places that “push” hard for recognition (he likens overworked food to an actor pushing a performance). Summer expands the circle: grilling sea bass and spaghetti with Tropea onions for friends; staging sprawling cottage holidays where tennis, naps, and simmering sauces set the day’s rhythm; and a transportive 24 hours at Guy Ritchie’s estate where a turbot becomes a masterclass in heat, timing, and the joy of eating with your hands by firelight.

What Tucci Is Really Arguing

Under the recipes and restaurant notes sit several convictions. First, simplicity is the highest culinary virtue. Carciofi, carbonara, or stracciatella need judicious touch, not reinvention; restraint lets ingredients—and the eater—breathe. Second, meals build the social world: they heal grief, renew friendships, and knit blended families. Third, craft matters—in kitchens and on sets. He praises directors who rehearse thoughtfully, like Edward Berger on Conclave, and chefs who make seasoned decisions that look effortless (compare his delight at Sabor’s tapas or Quo Vadis’s smoked-eel sandwich). Fourth, dignity and access to food are moral issues. His work with the Trussell Trust and UNHCR shows a paradox: we’ve never grown and moved food at this scale, and yet hunger is rising. Finally, time is always at the table: aging parents, kids’ quicksilver growth, anniversaries, funerals, and a gnawing awareness of finitude—made sharper by his past cancer and a COVID scare that briefly stole taste and smell.

Why This Matters To You

You don’t need to be a movie star to recognize the truth here: life is full of delays, detours, and airport buffets. What rescues the ordinary day is attention—to an egg done well, a broth that smells like home, a quick pasta that turns a tired evening into ceremony. Tucci’s small rituals—saving pasta water, seasoning with restraint, letting heat and time do the work—are practical techniques that double as a worldview: keep things simple; shop local; avoid fuss; feed others; and remember that tastes are a memory device. (Readers of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries will feel at home; fans of Anthony Bourdain will recognize the insistence on place and people over plate decoration.)

What You’ll Learn In This Summary

We’ll start with Tucci’s culinary minimalism—why restraint is a skill and how soup and eggs become life philosophies. We’ll move to family tables and the choreography of blended kinship, then travel through Rome, Dublin, Dingle, Como, and Moldova to see how place flavors appetite. We’ll examine the parallels between cooking and acting; look squarely at illness, taste, and resilience; consider food ethics and generosity; and end with tools, spaces, and rituals—from his Italian-made cookware to pizza-oven lessons and plans for an orchard. Along the way you’ll pick up techniques (from cod alla livornese to pesto mortar-work), but more importantly, a pattern for living: build your days around meals that respect ingredients, time, and the people you love.

A Year’s Thesis, In One Line

“Sharing food is one of the purest human acts.” In Tucci’s hands, that act becomes a daily art form resilient enough to hold grief, joy, work, and wonder.

Tucci’s cooking credo is disarmingly simple: fewer ingredients, better ingredients, right heat, and enough time. He rails against restaurants that “overthink” plates the way actors sometimes push a performance—showy, strained, and insecure. The alternative is not blandness, but clarity. Think of his Roman weeks built on minestrone jars, tomato sauce by the pot, and market greens; his Florentine cod alla livornese knocked out in fifteen minutes; or the way a London night becomes dinner with nothing more than mussels steamed in white wine, shallots, garlic, and parsley, plus toasted bread for dunking.

Soup Is A Worldview

“Soup is life in a pot,” he says over stracciatella at Armando al Pantheon. In Rome he batches minestrone on Sundays to ferry to cold soundstages. In the Cotswolds he and friend Anita improvise a Tucci Minestrone with onions, leeks, cavolo nero, Parmigiano rind, and peas—using whatever’s to hand, respecting sequence (sweat aromatics, add stock, hold greens till later), and finishing with cheese and olive oil. You see a chef’s mise en place, but also a philosophy: start with what you have, add what the season offers, let time do what rushing cannot.

Eggs, The Perfect Lesson

Few pages glow like his odes to eggs. He dreams of Jacques Pépin-level omelets, stands outside making fried eggs on a camping stove (because “everything tastes better outdoors”), and folds eggs into life at every turn: stracciatella soup in Rome; cacio-e-butter pasta enriched with scrambled egg when he’s knackered; a two-egg omelet slipped onto a buttered baguette with anchovies and sliced tomato (“My God.”). He also wrestles with eggs in ramen—learning to drop-poach—then ends the year making pappa al pomodoro, ruefully admitting he rushed the bread and paid the price. For you, eggs become a masterclass in heat, timing, and humility.

Pasta Is Practice, Not Performance

At home, he defaults to dishes that let ingredients speak: spaghetti con tonno (onion, good canned tomatoes, basil, oil-packed Italian tuna; “cheese discouraged. Extremely.”); tagliatelle with raw marinated tomatoes and goat cheese, warmed only by the pasta’s heat; orecchiette with sausage and broccolini; and carbonara with guanciale (always guanciale). When he strays—say, a soggy puff-pastry tart he forgot to blind bake—he names the error and recalibrates. The pattern is useful: salt early and lightly, save pasta water, emulsify in pan, finish off-heat.

Choose Restraint Over Reinvention

His most withering lines are for fussy menus and concave plates telegraphing gimmickry (“If you see those in any restaurant, do not cross that threshold.”). The praise goes to chefs like Nieves Barragán at Sabor (tapas, monkfish tempura, gem lettuce with bottarga that “needs nothing added”), Jeremy Lee at Quo Vadis (smoked eel sandwich with silken tartar’s cool counterpoint), and the fifth-generation team at Checchino dal 1887 (lasagna Bolognese where “years of culinary expertise” are baked in). Simplicity is not minimalism for its own sake; it’s confidence—knowing when to stop. (Compare Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on elemental control.)

Do This Tonight

Make cod alla livornese the Tucci way: sauté onion and halved garlic, add chopped pomodorini and basil, splash white wine, fold in olives and capers, nestle salted cod, cover 5 minutes, flip 3 minutes—serve with a drizzle of olive oil. Fifteen minutes, full flavor, zero fuss.

Simplicity, then, is a craft. You practice it like scales: with soup pots, egg pans, and pasta water. Done daily, it recalibrates your palate toward clarity—and your life toward ease.

Across the year, meals do what lectures can’t: they knit a blended family, soothe grief, and make space for joy. Tucci is frank about the difficulty of work–life balance in show business and the messiness of parenting across time zones. His fix is both practical and poetic: keep showing up at the table, even if that means two dinners—one for kids at six, one for adults at nine—until you can bring everyone together.

Small Rituals, Big Bonds

With his younger kids, Matteo and Millie, the rituals are homely and firm: pasta with butter and cheese (for a shockingly long stretch), soft-boiled eggs soldiers, sausages with rice and peas, jam sandwiches with stealth cucumbers. He makes peace with their limited palates by pairing novelty with safety: when Matteo requests spaghetti con tonno, Millie gets her promised back-up bowl of buttered pasta—and then doesn’t need it. Over months, “picky” becomes curious (Matteo grows to love carbonara and tries boudin blanc and sea bass; Millie devours raw tomatoes and avocado). The lesson for you: expose without forcing, pair new with known, and make the table predictable even when life isn’t.

Grief And Continuity

The table also carries absences with grace. There are aching passages about his late wife, Kate—watching the documentaries of another couple’s illness forces a re-encounter with his own—and quieter notes as he returns to the Westchester house where she died (now owned by Willie Geist) and remembers their pizza-oven Christmases. Hosting now merges past and present: a risotto for Saoirse Ronan (whom he first protected as a child actor) and chicken cacciatore for a table of friends; cottage pie for a cozy New Year’s; Thanksgiving sides built from family recipes (bread stuffing with water chestnuts, baked beans “need to be viscous, not runny”). Traditions don’t erase grief; they give it a place.

Hospitality As Friendship

This is also a year of feeding friends: Harry Styles cycles over for leek–zucchini risotto and cod alla livornese; Richard Madden and Cheryl arrive to tagliatelle with marinated tomatoes and sirloin with herb sauce; Woody Harrelson and Laura come post-show to spaghetti pomodoro; the Blunt–Krasinski clan gets Nerano zucchini, chicken cutlets, and marinara bakes. It’s not showy—no twelve-course galleries—just (often) two courses, a salad, and a bottle opened with laughter. The point is proximity, not prestige. (M.F.K. Fisher wrote similarly in The Art of Eating.)

Choosing To Eat Together

Near the epilogue, he and Felicity decide to stop doing “two dinners” and push mealtime so the whole family eats together, bolstered by snacks to bridge after-school hunger. Matteo sums up the impact in six words: “I like it so much better.” That sentence could be the book’s quiet north star. In one calendar year, you see a blended family move from parallel tracks to a shared table—and feel how the most ordinary decision (sit down together) can be the most transformative.

Practice To Steal

Pair every “try-this” dish for kids with a sure thing; ritualize one weekly soup or pasta; and let guests bring the time, not the food—your job is to set the space where everyone can breathe.

Meals in this book aren’t backdrops. They’re how love gets made visible, negotiated nightly and renewed by heat, seasoning, and seats pulled closer together.

Tucci’s appetite is geographic. He eats like a cartographer, mapping cities by markets, trattorie, pubs, and the one dish that unlocks their accent. Across the year, you learn how to choose rooms and rooms-with-stoves, what to order where, and how to discern confidence from pretense. The rule is consistent: go where the food, service, and room feel unforced.

Rome: History In A Bite

Working at Cinecittà, he triangulates the Eternal City by taste. At Checchino dal 1887 he eats silky carciofi alla romana and a lasagna Bolognese that tastes like time, told amid the amphorae hill of Testaccio (fifteen million cubic feet of olive-oil jars, once stacked to create natural wine cellars). At Taverna Trilussa, he orders bucatini all’Amatriciana and hears the deliciously grim origin story of strozzapreti—“priest chokers,” born of parishioners’ eggless pasta made in rage. At Sora Lella he praises pajata di vitello (calf intestine with its mother’s milk in a light tomato sauce), again crediting poor Romans’ brilliance with offal. And at Armando al Pantheon, he defends soup’s crown via perfect stracciatella, then carbonara where guanciale, not pancetta, is the law.

Elsewhere In Italy: Ritual And Revelation

Lake Como gives him grilled octopus with cream of peas at Bilacus and the Alps’ consoling permanence. In Umbria, the aglione sauce—big, almost scentless garlic that blooms into perfume once cooked—meets umbricelli (Tuscan pici by another name), and a hired pizzaiolo turns a rocky relationship with his home pizza oven into a salt-on-the-stone epiphany. Pommidoro’s pre-opening party becomes a love letter to revived family places (he’d featured it on Searching for Italy), and in Brescia his Italian-made cookware line gets field-tested with risotto, cacciatore, and a fish stew that proves content cooking can still taste good.

Ireland: The Joy Of Unfussy Plenty

Dublin turns into a streak of five flawless meals—Pichet (capers and T10, house-vermouth cocktails), Uno Mas, Library Street, Fish Shop—and the real fun is watching an old friend, Aidan Quinn, eat well after a life of fried eggs and very-well-done steaks. Dingle doubles down on what travel should feel like: Guinness at Dick Mack’s (and a tutorial on why some pints are richer: hose hygiene, tank freshness, luck), fried fish tacos at Fish Box, and salt-stung cliff walks to Coumeenoole Beach. The constant? Welcoming rooms where people, not plates, are the point.

Moldova: Hope At A Shared Table

The UNHCR trip reframes taste as solidarity. In a winery kitchen he cooks borscht and buttery garlic buns with Ukrainian refugee mothers—Svetlana, Julia—who joke, chop, and then cry for home; later, chef Dmitri at Julien (ex-Paris Michelin kitchens) feeds them a jellied rabbit, placinte, and a blackened tomahawk and pork feast that ends with a speech: “Live in this moment. Tomorrow is an illusion.” For you, place becomes ethical: eating can be aid, presence, and proof that someone sees you.

How To Read A Room

Tucci’s diagnostics are sharp. If a menu chases every country, beware. If plates are oversized and concave, flee. If the bread and wine are already right, relax. He celebrates staff who behave like steady hosts (the Carmelite nuns at L’Eau Vive turning a dining room into a hymn, J. Sheekey’s tartar sauce pitched exactly cool against seared skate) and avoids culinary cosplay. Travel, then, isn’t a parade of trophies; it’s a search for rooms that feel already lived in.

Travel Rule Of Thumb

Pick the place where the simplest thing on the menu is the best thing on the menu. If the stracciatella, eel sandwich, or fries are extraordinary, you’re safe.

Tucci keeps spotting the same muscles firing in kitchens and on sets: patience, rehearsal, economy, collaboration, and a distrust of grandstanding. He’s brutal on Italian film catering (“alas, it has not improved in 25 years”), but reverent about directors who rehearse thoughtfully and let actors’ movement dictate shots—Edward Berger on Conclave is his model. In food, he seeks an equivalent: chefs who do less, better.

Rehearsal And Mise En Place

Memorizing lines gets harder with age; his workaround is a recorder for missing cues and endless repetition (“tedious but necessary”). In the kitchen, repetition is mise en place: saving pasta water by reflex, resting risotto under a lid for mantecatura, or resisting the urge to crowd a pan. He tells on himself when he ignores the voice—soggy tart from skipping the blind bake, under-seared scallops after cooling the pan. The meta-lesson for you: practice doesn’t stunt creativity; it enables it.

Waiting Is Paid Work

A veteran actor once told him, “It’s the waiting I get paid for. The acting I do for free.” He applies the same logic to cooking: let onions sweat fully; reduce marinades; allow a steak to be chipped and returned to the fire so each cut is perfect all the way through (the Guy Ritchie lesson). Rushing collapses structure—in scenes and sauces.

Awards Are A Bad Compass

He’s wary of performances that shout “look at my depth!” and menus that chase stars (“pushed” food, concave plates). By contrast, he praises ease: Sabor’s star that never got in the way of flavor; Riva’s decades of seasonal Lombardy cooking; Quo Vadis’s sandwich that is both rustic and exact; Checchino’s fifth-generation calm. The same humility marks his joy hosting: martinis on arrival, two or three things cooked well, conversation carrying the night. (Harold McGee and Thomas Keller make similar arguments about precision without ostentation.)

Community Fuels Craft

Acting is gypsy work; feeding keeps you human. The roster this year—Harry Styles reading Rilke and drinking tequila; Saoirse Ronan at the stove as Tucci runs two risottos, vegan and standard; a late dinner with Colin Firth and Tom Ford; Woody Harrelson between shows; friends who become “instant family” on location—proves an artist’s circle is held together more by home cooking than premieres. He’s proudest when the house feels like a sanctuary for “bleary-eyed thespians.”

Quiet Standard

Do the simple thing impeccably. Whether it’s a line read, tartar sauce, or spaghetti con tonno, let the work breathe so the people can.

Seen this way, cooking isn’t time stolen from art—it’s the practice that keeps art honest. Both crafts reward restraint, memory, and the generosity of feeding your scene partners well.

Tucci writes with candor about the fragility of appetite. Five years post–throat cancer, saliva and tannins still complicate wine; lines like “it’s nearly impossible to drink very tannic reds” are both medical note and new doorway into Alto Adige and Friuli pinot noirs. He schedules PET scans, insists on full-body imaging after a misdiagnosis, and shares the relief of a “NED” (no evidence of disease) five-year mark.

The COVID Scare

Late in the year, COVID hits. Taste and smell vanish—terrifying for anyone, existential for someone whose work now includes filmed tasting. His parents fall ill (his father hospitalized with COVID pneumonia), and he battles guilt over likely transmission. The line that lands hardest: if taste doesn’t return, “I could never in good conscience ‘fake taste’ my way through Italy.” It does return—but those days sharpen his gratitude for every anchovy, every soup.

Eating With Constraints

He adjusts, not quits. Lower-tannin wines, fewer meats that challenge saliva, more soups and seafood. He’s honest about misfires (airline food “formerly known as salmon”) and the joy of small wins (a Nobu congee-like comfort in a Cathay lounge set; a smoked-eel sandwich whose warm fish and cool tartar are perfectly textured). Health isn’t a diet so much as a calibration: choosing what allows pleasure without pain.

Aging, Time, And Presence

Beyond scans and infections, there’s time’s steady pull. His 93-year-old father’s sudden lethargy turns out to be overmedication; within days, he’s back to jewelry-making and calligraphy. His mother, indefatigable at 86, still power-walks grocery aisles like a southern Italian mountain goat. In the same breath, he remembers cemetery Sundays in Peekskill and the Tucci family plot designed by his father; he jokes he hopes someone will plant an olive tree for him “to be useful even in death.” Food becomes a way to face finitude with others: a gnocchi dinner after a frightening week; a circle of candles on New Year’s Eve replacing the bonfires of old friends.

Health As Curiosity

There’s science, too. He sits with his oncologist, who’s researching the oral microbiome’s role in head-and-neck cancers—how shifts in bacteria and diet might tilt risk or recovery—and learns his HPV-linked cancer is now detectable via blood more precisely than scans. It’s striking how Tucci never becomes didactic; he stays a student, folding new knowledge into his daily appetites.

A Simple Vow

Treat every regained taste as a gift. Build meals that make that gift easier—broths, textures that welcome your body back, wines that don’t fight your mouth.

Resilience here isn’t heroic. It’s domestic: keep cooking, keep adjusting, let pleasure and prudence co-exist, and invite people over anyway.

Tucci’s year isn’t only private meals. It’s studded with public tables aimed at dignity: fundraising Q&As for War Child; a Royal Albert Hall event for the Trussell Trust; plans for a bicultural royal menu with Ambassador Inigo Lambertini and chef Francesco Mazzei (risotto with British mushrooms; salt-baked UK sea bass; roast Welsh lamb). He’s blunt: how can we move so much food so fast and still see food insecurity rise—also in wealthy countries?

The Trussell Trust Reality

Over 500 UK food banks, a 40% year-over-year surge in need. He names the causes without jargon: soaring fuel and food costs, sinking standards of living, and the paradox that those who move food can’t always afford to eat it. The tone is not preachy; it’s practical solidarity. He uses his platform to raise six figures and remind you that meals are a human right wrapped in human ritual.

UNHCR: Sharing As Witness

In Moldova, cooking with refugee mothers is the clearest answer to “what can I do?”—be with, cook, eat, listen. Chef Dmitri’s post-service oration (“Live in this moment. Tomorrow is an illusion.”) could read as fatalism; in the room it feels like courage: if we can eat and sing tonight, we resist erasure. This is the book’s moral: the table isn’t just comfort—it’s counter-history against dispossession.

Etiquette Versus Ethics

Tucci reserves special ire for misdirected boldness: a posh fundraiser who cold-calls his door on a Saturday night, demanding access via the trauma of his bereavement—“Who does that?” Boundary-setting is part of dignity. By contrast, humble rooms—nuns passing out hymn sheets; an embassy lunch sketched to honor both British ingredients and Italian form; community markets where he buys too much—model a better way: ask, invite, share.

Your Move

Pick one local lever—food bank shifts, neighbor cooking, refugee supper clubs—and make it a monthly ritual. Generosity is a muscle best trained on a schedule.

In Tucci’s hands, hospitality is political without becoming partisan. It’s the insistence that everyone deserves a seat, and that the meal itself can be a small act of repair.

This is also a book about the stuff that makes cooking joyful: pans, ovens, markets, gardens, and rooms that invite lingering. You watch Tucci design an Italian-made cookware line with GreenPan—insisting it be PFA-free and actually made in Italy—and field-test it in Brescia (asparagus risotto slides off the nonstick; chicken cacciatore browns rather than steams). You see how the right tool saves time without stealing soul.

Learning Your Heat

The pizza oven is a yearlong subplot. He keeps burning pies until a hired pizzaiolo from Pizza Pilgrims shows him two secrets: monitor the floor temperature (not just the dome), and toss a little salt on the stone to create a non-burning barrier before loading your pie. The next day, his margheritas blaze. The metaphor is neat: learn the physics of your tools and you’ll stop fighting them.

Rooms That Work

He buys a fixer-upper in the south of England, already dreaming orchards and a second kitchen to film in. He adores Firmdale hotels (Crosby, Charlotte Street, Whitby) because they feel like rooms that want you there: clean, idiosyncratic, generously lit. Conversely, he bristles at “high-concept” apartments with lighting panels “designed by an angry astronaut.” Choose spaces that lower your shoulders; your food will taste better.

Markets And Overbuying (Happily)

The year’s best mornings start at Mercato di Campagna Amica (Rome), farmers’ markets in the Cotswolds, and Garsons pick-your-own in Surrey—Tropea onions, baby zucchini, parsley root, marrow bones, blackberries. He overbuys; then he cooks to the drawer: zucchini parmigiana layered with leftover potatoes and marinara; chicken salad salvaged with Hellmann’s when homemade mayo breaks; rainbow chard boiled with garlic, finished with EVOO (and sometimes passata). The rhythm for you: shop short, cook long, and repurpose relentlessly.

Cocktails, Candles, Ceremony

He keeps ceremony simple: martinis or Palomas (his gin riff: grapefruit, lime, agave, Pellegrino), music through an iPhone in a coffee cup, candles outside on New Year’s Eve when there’s no bonfire to gather round. These touches aren’t garnish; they’re how an ordinary Tuesday becomes a memory. His final dream—an eel stuffed with minced beef baked like a medieval centerfold—lands the joke: even in sleep, the mind crafts tables to gather around, then wakes to wonder what to cook next.

Build Your Setup

One good nonstick, one heavy sauté, a dependable stockpot, a pizza steel or stone, and a mortar & pestle. Add a weekly market ritual and a playlist—you’re set.

Tools and spaces, in Tucci’s telling, are not status; they’re enablers of attention. Choose them well, and daily cooking becomes the most reliable joy you own.