Taste: My Life Through Food

Tucci gets an offer to film in the UK while he and Felicity are still dating, so she helps him find a place for his family (including his parents) to stay. One evening, Felicity volunteers to make roast potatoes for dinner to help Tucci’s mother, who usually does most of the cooking. However, how she embarks on making this common dish seemed unusual to the Americans in the room: first, she boils the potatoes, then she drains and shakes them vigorously before adding them to an already smoking-hot pan of oil—actually, goose fat. This causes billows of smoke to be unleashed through the room. While Tucci is flabbergasted by her methods, his parents take her side—“like dueling Judas Iscariots,” he wryly states (216)—and the potatoes turn out to be delicious. The recipe for “Felicity’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Roast Potatoes” is included (217-18).

Tucci begins by recounting a plan to cook a suckling pig for a party, then launches into a lengthy digression about the disappearance of specialist butchers, fishmongers, and the like. He notes that these specialized purveyors are still available in Britain, though the tradition is fading, whereas, in the United States, they are all but gone. He returns to his original story about the suckling pig to reveal its relative failure: it was too large for the outdoor oven, so he had to lop off its head; the rotisserie collapsed under its weight, so it had to be cranked by hand.