Taste: My Life Through Food

Tucci remembers his late wife, Kathryn Spath, who died of cancer in 2009. The couple bonded over food, and Tucci admits that Kate embraced his family’s culinary legacy: “I introduced my family’s recipes into our daily fare and eventually […] Kate usually ended up making them better than I did. Some of them much better” (92). He cites a particular example of Kate making his mother cry after reproducing her lasagna to perfection.

His former in-laws were another matter, people who were not necessarily interested in or adventuresome about food. He notes that “Kate and I would do the cooking” when visiting her family “because we knew what our kids would and wouldn’t eat, cooking made us happy, and being cooked for made my in-laws happy” (94). However, there was one exception: his father-in-law’s penchant for cooking Maine lobster simply but deliciously. Tucci gives him full credit for “direct[ing] his energies into perfecting it” (97), his one signature dish.

Tucci details his family’s Christmas traditions, then and now. In his childhood, his mother would prepare the traditional Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, a part of their Catholic heritage. He lists a typical menu, detailed and luxurious but simple at the same time.