This looked interesting.
Stanley Tucci: Actor, Writer, Cook

Dining Slide Show





To appreciate how much food means to the actor Stanley Tucci and his extended family, you have to hear the stories about his maternal grandmother, Concetta Tropiano, who pickled her own tomatoes, canned her own pears, curdled her own ricotta, brewed her own beer and fattened her own chickens, rabbits and goats in Verplanck, N.Y., about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan.

You have to hear in particular about her doughy twilight, when death came knocking but she was too busy with focaccia to answer the door.

This was in the mid-1990s, when she was in her late 80s. A stroke mostly paralyzed her left arm, limiting her kitchen work. She nonetheless insisted on doing something as she recovered, and used the kneading of dough as therapy, the making of pizza — and focaccia — as rehabilitation.

About a year after the stroke, a devastating infection forced the amputation of her left leg. Relatives gathered to comfort her as she emerged from surgery.

“To cheer her up, we asked her to tell us, again, how to make stuffed artichokes,” recalled Joan Tucci, her daughter and Stanley’s mother. “She went through the whole thing.”

“I thought the nurse was going to die,” Mrs. Tucci added. “Only an Italian would talk about food at a time like this.”

Mrs. Tucci lost her mother in 1997, when Mrs. Tropiano was 88. But Mrs. Tropiano’s legacy endures, in part through “The Tucci Cookbook,” a paean to Italian cooking — and to Italian-American families — that is being published next week.

It includes recipes from the Tropiano and Tucci sides of the clan, both of which have roots in Calabria, in southern Italy. It reflects the year in the early 1970s when Joan Tucci and her husband, Stanley Sr., temporarily moved their children to Florence, became familiar with northern Italian cooking and fell hard for lasagne verde. It bows to “Big Night,” a 1996 movie, set in an Italian-American restaurant, that Stanley Tucci not only acted in but also helped write and direct. The movie, in fact, inspired a previous, shorter, less glossy version of “The Tucci Cookbook,” titled “Cucina & Famiglia.”...

Nice, Lilo. I was going to post this myself but you beat me to it. You'll remember that "Big Night" is my favorite independent film ever. Tucci proved that you can make a great film about Italian Americans without mentioning the Mafia.

I love Stanley Tucci, and some of his films are my favorite: "Devil Wears Prada", "Easy A" and "Shall We Dance". However, my favorite of his about Italian-American families is "The Whole Shebang". This cookbook sounds terrific.

I figured you would have seen that article PB. Good stuff.

I think you may have been Italian in a past life, Lilo .