Stanley Tucci - The Tucci table

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To my family, ever growing, ever hungry...

M y life has been sustained by food beyond mere nourishment. The relationships forged by the acts of cooking and eating with others have had a profound effect on me and have more and more significance with every passing year. When I think of the moments that have brought me the most pleasure, the most joy, they are almost always framed within the context of food and the table. It is for this reason that this book exists.

A number of years ago, I helped put together a book for my culinary-loving parents and my friend Chef Gianni Scappin. Originally titled Cucina e Famiglia and later revised and reissued as The Tucci Cookbook, it was written to celebrate and safeguard the culinary history of our familiesand this book does very much the same thing. I feel that so much of what shapes and binds a family is ephemeral. By this I mean that, besides photographs and home movies, families rely primarily on their oral histories of significant personal or familial events and experiences. Few families bother to write them down or even film a relative recounting them (although we all have reams of footage of the family pet doing something inane), and when it comes to recipes the same often holds true. We cook these familiar dishes the way we always have, without much thought because we know them well. But if they are never written down, tomorrow those recipes and the memories they fill us with will be gone forever.

My late wife, Kate, was a wonderful and generous cook. Our childrenIsabel, Nicolo, and Camillaand I have done our best to re-create many of her dishes because regretfully, save a couple, they were never written down. Making them now keeps her ever present in our lives, and, although they were delicious, what made them truly special was that they were of her and that she made them for us.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet Felicity at her sister Emilys wedding. Whenever we chatted during that weekend the conversation inevitably turned to food; what dishes we loved, where we had eaten, and ultimately, by the end of the wedding, where we would eat together. When that fateful meal did transpire I bore witness to a passion and appetite for food and wine that rivaled my own (and perhaps those of Henry VIII and Bacchus combined). I have never seen so slender a person enjoy her food so much. I was rapt.

As we neared the end of our sybaritic repast and I was so stuffed I could barely breathe, I heard the woman who would one day be my wife innocently utter this query to a passing waiter: Can we order a cheese plate? I was agog. So was the waiter. She then turned her attention back to me and asked, Where do you want to eat tomorrow? I was in love.

In both the Tucci and the Blunt families, the act of eating together has always played a vital part. This book pays homage to our respective culinary traditions (mine from my grandparents and parents, Felicitys from her maternal grandmother), and expresses the new culinary traditions we are in the process of creating for the next generation. The following recipes are interpretations of dishes Felicity and I have enjoyed in restaurants, at friends houses, or that we have created together over the last few years. They are an amalgam of our British and Italo-American palates, and they are dishes we think are worthy enough to put to paper and pass on to people and families who love to cook and eat as much as we do. With the guidance of our dear friend Kay Plunkett-Hogge and her extraordinary culinary knowledge, talent, literary skills, patience, humor, and fervent imagination, we have been able to write the book wed wanted.

Both Felicity and I have a profound belief in the family meal, something that in our overscheduled lives is all but disappearing. The act of eating together, no matter how modest the meal, is an act of communion and celebration demonstrating that we matter to one another. For us this also pertains to our wider family of friends and colleagues who have celebrated at the table with us over the years, some of whom have kindly shared their recipes and stories in this book.

The dinner table is the anvil upon which we forge our relationships. Be they ties of family, of friendship, of new love or of old, it is a place where we share the events of our day, our feelings, our stories, our memories, and our hopes and promises for the future.

Our family hopes that you and your family will find as much joy in these recipes as we do.

Stanley Tucci

London 2014

T he following things will make implementing the recipes in this book a little easier:

A very simple implement, but tongs are the one thing that I find indispensable.

I prefer good, heavy-bottomed copper or metal pots and pans. I also find a cast-iron skillet invaluable. In terms of sizes, simply put, small, medium, and large. An additional extra-large pot for making 2 pounds of pasta or stock and a 4- to 5-quart Dutch oven.

I dont care for nonstick pans. If I use a nonstick pan, I opt for a ceramic nonstick surface as opposed to Teflon. Green Pan and Bialetti make good ones.

These stove top diffusers spread the heat evenly across the bottom of your pan and are essential for keeping a sauce on a really low simmer.

You can use this for grating Parmigiano-Reggiano or nutmeg and for zesting citrus.

Not a necessity, but very helpful for achieving consistently thin slices.

Large enough to hold up to 2 pounds of pasta, and a couple of smaller ones for draining peas and other vegetables.