Book Review - Taste: my life through food by Stanley Tucci

 Taste: my life through food by Stanley Tucci

[NC]: Penguin Books, 2022 (first published 2021)    ISBN 9780241501009

I haven't seen too many Stanley Tucci films, apart from The Devil wears Prada which is one of my wife's favourite films. So, he wasn't really on my radar, until I caught his television series Searching for Italy, which I loved not only for the food, but for Tucci's undeniable style and wickedly dry sense of humour.

So, this Christmas, my wife bought me this book. I'm very pleased to state it's all I hoped it would be - witty, urbane, chic in an understated way, and of course a paean to Stanley's life-long enjoyment of food. Every now and then one reads a book and when you realise you are coming to the end you slow down, to delay the inevitable disappointment of finishing. This is one of those books.

The book is a memoir told through food. It is a love letter to his parents, particularly his mother. And it is a description of all the glorious (and not so glorious) food that he has eaten in his life. Tucci's grandparents were Calabrian immigrants to the USA, and so the food he ate in his younger years was Italian, and it is that food - basic and hearty Italian cuisine, that forms the basis of this book.

The book is structured around moments in Tucci's life, where he describes his childhood, or a moment of filming, or his life in New York or London, spiralling in to food, and often providing a recipe so that the reader can make and enjoy the dish he is writing about. He talks about restaurants long gone (and recently gone - it's sad how many restaurants shut their doors due to the COVID epidemic), and current, as well as the great family feasts and all the joy and argument that comes with them (it is an Italian family after all).

His vignettes of the film world are fascinating and amusing, particularly his rendition of a dinner with Marcello Mastroianni, about which he writes "...even the birth of my children has not given me the joy I felt from that invitation." It is this sort of humour that pervades the book and which makes it a joy to read. There are quite a few laugh out loud moments too.

Tucci doesn't shy away from the tough times in his life. His first wife died from cancer, and the trauma of that is obvious in the book, as was the fear when he himself was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth a few years ago - the last part of the book describes how he lost the ability to eat, to taste and to enjoy food - which made him realise just how much food and all it entails means to him. His description of his slow climb back to eating is uplifting, and a fitting end to a wonderful tale. 

Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Land where Lemons grow by Helena Attlee

 The Land where Lemons grow: the story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit by Helena Attlee

London: Penguin Books, 2015 (first published 2014)        ISBN 9780241952573

When my wife bought this book several years ago I was intrigued by the sub-title. I know the mafia germinated in the lemon groves of Sicily (excuse the pun), and thought that this book might give me some insight into that snippet of Italian history. It didn't really do that, but it has given me so much more, and is a fascinating insight into the story of citrus fruit and how it has intertwined with the Italian lifestyle for more than five hundred years.

Attlee's book is a combination of her experience travelling around Italy's historic citrus growing areas, sprinkled with the history of the fruit, and the social milieu of the growers over time, focusing mainly on history from the Renaissance. The book is full of interesting snippets of history, information about the fruits and how they were used, and fills the reader with the desire to go and see these scenes themselves.

There is lots of interesting information about citrus. Attlee explains that the entire citrus catalogue sprang from three original fruits - Pomelo, Mandarin and Citron, from Malaysia, China and the Himalaya. A curious feature of the citrus family is that cross-pollination is not only possible, it happens incredibly easily, so if you plant different types of citrus together they will continually hybridize.

And so we have Oranges, Lemons, Bergamot and Citron, which along with smaller references to Sour Orange (a fruit which is now pretty much a historical oddity), form the framework of this book. Attlee seeks out the places in Italy where they are still grown, explains their origins in the country, their expansion, decline and regrowth.

The fruits were originally brought in by others (the Citron to Calabria by Jews in c. AD 70 and the Lemon to Sicily by Arabs in approximately 900), and through hard work, the climate of Italy did the rest. Attlee is at pains to point out that for some reason the citrus grown in Italy is superior to those grown in other climes. The Citrons of Calabria are still valued by certain Jewish sects to use in their ceremonies. The Bergamot is valued in perfume. The Lemons of Sicily are world famous, and made many (particularly the Mafia) rich on the back of supply contracts with the Royal Navy.

But it's not only Southern Italy where citrus flourished. The Medici and other Italian nobility had great collections of citrus in the Sixteenth Century - in the colder climes of Tuscany and Lake Garda the citrus was potted and moved into glasshouses to survive the winter, or, if planted at Lake Garda, had greenhouses built around them to overwinter. 

Once the Nineteenth Century moved into the Twentieth, the citrus boom died off. The Lemons of Lake Garda disappeared during World War One, when the timber of their temporary greenhouses was used for trenches - the aristocratic citrus gardens of Florence had long since withered. The Royal Navy had turned to "British" limes (from the West Indies) for its vitamin C (about half as good as Sicilian lemons as it turns out), and the world had found cheaper and closer places to source citrus.

Attlee explains all this in just enough detail to be interesting, but not so much that the reader gets lost. She also describes how some entrepreneurial Italians are trying to rebuild the great traditions of Italian citrus growing, becoming artisan producers, with a focus on quality to try and recapture the glory years.

The Land where Lemons grow is a wonderful book in so many ways - highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Sugar special - Pure, white and deadly by John Yudkin, Fat Chance by Robert Lustig

Pure, white and deadly by John Yudkin (revised edition)

Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986      ISBN 0670808199

Fat chance : beating the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease
by Robert H. Lustig

New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012          ISBN 9781594631009


Sugar. Seems so harmless doesn't it? These two books go a long way to debunking that idea. Some readers may be aware of Robert Lustig from his famed YouTube video "Sugar, the bitter truth", which has become somewhat of a seminal moment in the current "anti-sugar movement", if we want to call it that.

Lustig in fact was inspired by John Yudkin's book. Yudkin was a Professor of Nutrition at London University, where he set up the department of nutrition in the 1950s. During his research into nutrition and obesity he was led more and more to sugar consumption as the root cause of many of the ills besetting modern man.

Pure, white and deadly is a synthesis of his discoveries up to the early 1980s. His  main contentions are that sugar is quite probably one of the main sources for the symptoms leading to heart disease, but he also looks at sugar's role in diabetes and other conditions. Further research undertaken after this book's publication, and recent insights and discoveries about how the body actually metabolises food, have added weight to the conclusions Yudkin makes in this book.

Which brings us to Robert Lustig. Diet science and endocrinology have come a very long way since the first edition of Yudkin's book (1972), and has progressed since the updated 1986 edition that I read. Lustig uses much of the new research on the interaction of food with the body to write a convincing, chilling polemic against the current state of the food industry, including government (in)action, and medical dithering.

Lustig takes us through the advances in understanding how the body processes the food that it consumes. The complex process is explained as simply as possible by Lustig, and leads to the inescapable conclusion that we need to let our bodies do the processing of the food, rather than let industry do the processing for us. So, we should, as much as possible, eat unprocessed food and avoid sugar.

The latest research shows the long-term dangers of sugar - raising insulin levels, which block leptin signals to the brain, so satiety signals are not triggered - meaning you keep eating. The fructose in sugar (50%), and High Fructose Corn Syrup, bypasses the body's processes for dealing with sugars, creating more damage, being one of the major contributors to visceral fat, which is a big danger, leading to metabolic syndrome.

Lustig posits that throughout history, man has eaten mainly proteins or carbohydrates, mostly on separate occasions - it is only relatively recently that we have been able to combine them in one meal, and that tends to overwhelm the body. Fructose is doubly bad as it acts as a carb and a fat at the same time. Fibre's necessity for the body is more fully understood now as well - it slows the release into the body of sugars in the food, helping to maintain blood glucose at a better level: that's why fruit is good for you, while fruit juice is bad.

The low-fat paradigm, begun in the 1980s, targeted the wrong issue in reducing heart disease - too much fat is bad, but too much sugar is much worse - and fat combined with sugar is disastrous. The amount of sugar someone on the Western diet consumes can be up to 10 times the recommended amount: much of the sugar coming "hidden" in processed food.

So, what should we do? Lustig strongly believes that it is up to governments to regulate the food industry for long-term improvement in our diets, but there is much an individual can do as well. Fortunately, the insidious effects of sugar on the metabolism can be reversed in a relatively short time it seems, once off the sugar bandwagon. The advice is simple, and nothing you haven't heard before - don't drink sugared beverages (including fruit juice and flavoured milk), avoid processed food as much as possible, and increase consumption of "real" food - "if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it as food, don't eat it".

Fat Chance is required reading for those concerned about the health of our society in the twenty-first century.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

Medium raw : a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook by Anthony Bourdain

New York : Ecco, 2010                                                                ISBN 9780061718953



A little while ago I read and immensly enjoyed Kitchen confidential, which I reviewed here. Since then I've seen a few episodes of Bourdain's No Reservations TV show, which was enjoyable enough to watch if I stumbled on to it while surfing, but not enjoyable enough to actively hunt out. Bourdain has developed his schtick of noir / gonzo food expert into a successful career, and good on him. Medium raw continues in that vein.

Whereas Kitchen confidential was a kind of autobiography with other bits thrown in, Medium raw is more of the other bits, which occasionally reflect Bourdain's life post confidential (which became a huge bestseller). The opening section introduces this new life, where he's invited along with New York's food glitterati to eat a forbidden fruit (Ortalan). This, along with a hilarious chapter that includes a Caribbean island, a psychotic girlfriend and the Gaddafi family, are the high gonzo parts of this book.

A fair portion of the book discusses the food scene in the US, from chef whizkids to the Food Channel. While I don't know any of the names Bourdain is dropping, his rants about good versus bad food, militant veganism, and the inanities of food porn on the TV are all entertaining. Bourdain is at his best when he's pointing out the BS that is spouted about food - he has a fine chapter on organic/local/"good" food, noting that a lot of people in the US can't actually afford to go down that path when looking at the dollars available vs. the cost of food equation.

He also is justifiably horrified at the state of the US food industry - his chapter on hamburgers is part horror story of feedlot meat treated with ammonia before sale, and part disgust at wagyu beef being placed in a bun. His skilled "knifework" on Alan Richman, food critic of the New York Times, is a delight, and could be the opening shots in a long-running war.

The final section of the book takes us back to Kitchen confidential, with a "where are they now" flavour. Bourdain returns in this final section to a recurring theme that pops up throughout the book, which is how he hit the jackpot quite unexpectedly, how he thought his life as a chef would keep trucking along until (a probably early) death, but for the (to Bourdain) inexplicable success of his (not actually) first book.

Not quite as good as Kitchen confidential, Medium raw is still a good way to pass a weekend - you'll laugh out loud in places.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Kitchen Confidential : adventures in the culinary underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

New York: The Ecco Press, 2001                           ISBN 0060934913


I am no chef. I'm not even really a cook - I can manage to produce a meal, as long as it's a simple meat-and-veg affair, or perhaps a chilli or spaghetti - but if you're looking for culinary delights, it's best to ask my wife to provide. I'm more interested in the eating. As is Tony Bourdain.

Kitchen Confidential begins with a young Bourdain visiting relatives in France, where he is first turned on to the idea of food by eating an oyster fresh from the sea (something his parents baulk at). This anecdote sets up Bourdain's book - he moves quickly on from there to Provincetown in New England, where he has his first job in a kitchen, and from where he begins his journey into the strange, subterranean world of chefs and restaurant cookery.

Part noir thriller, part guide to cooking and eating well, it's easy to see why Kitchen Confidential became a best seller, and why Bourdain has moved on to become a television celebrity. The style of the book owes a lot to others both in and out of the genre - there's a bit of Raymond Chandler, a bit of Henry Miller, and quite a bit of George Orwell (Down and out in Paris and London). In fact many of the kitchen scenes in the book have more than a sniff of Orwell about them - late in the book Bourdain describes Down and out in Paris and London as "invaluable". Bourdain's description of himself and his fellow workers portray an image of a group of half-insane drug addicts, psychopaths, thieves and charlatans - detritus collected in the grease-trap of life that is second-rate restaurants. Of course we always need to keep in mind when reading that "cold recitation of the facts" is something Bourdain says is "hardly what I've been up to". There is certainly quite a bit of hyperbole in his descriptions of himself (how did he keep getting such good gigs if he was such a junkie?) and others - Adam "Real-Last-Name-Unknown" is one of the great characters of the book, but surely not everything written about him can be "real" - even if I for one hope it is.

Parts of this book had appeared before publication in various magazines, and this does give the book a slightly disjointed effect, moving from Bourdain's career, to what sort of items a home cook might need to become better at the craft, back to Bourdain, and then back to why you might want to avoid the Monday night fish special at your local restaurant. The disjointedness actually feeds well into Bourdain's narrative of a drug addled career that lurched from the sublime to the ridiculous on more than one occasion. Bourdain's journey comes full circle by the end of the book, from French Oyster to strange Japanese seafood restaurant, where he re-affirms that it's all about the eating.

Bourdain's use of language is perfect - he never flinches from telling it like it was, and is unafraid to use the exact terminology (read foul language) of the kitchen. The book has the impression of something that was tossed off after (or before) hours, quite quickly, but he has certainly spent many hours getting his scenarios reading perfectly. Just a snippet from the chapter where he talks about how you can improve your cooking at home - this about purchasing good (i.e. heavyweight) pots and pans - "A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent - the victim's head or your pan - then throw that pan right in the trash." It's this kind of humour and writing skill that makes this book so enjoyable, and such fun to read - I basically knocked it off in two sittings.

If you, like myself, have yet to catch up with this book, I can highly recommend it - I'll be hunting around for the sequel Medium raw : a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook.

Check out your local library for a copy of Kitchen Confidential, or you can try Amazon.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell