What I Ate in One Year: (and related thoughts)

by Stanley Tucci

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN

Cannellini beans, canned tuna, red onion, tomatoes, and olive oil. I made a pot of tomato sauce because I find the act and aroma comforting and I know I will eat it with pasta or rice over the next few days.

I spent the next day exercising and memorizing lines. Unless I have someone to read the lines with me, I do this with the aid of a tape recorder. I record the other actor’s lines and leave gaps for my own. And then I do it over and over and over again. Tedious but necessary. Especially as one ages. If a script is well written the lines will come easily. If not, then they don’t.

Actors will often blame themselves for not being able to retain certain passages or scenes, but it is often the script that is to blame because the character’s thoughts don’t track. By this I mean that the character isn’t speaking naturally but instead the writer is using that character as a mouthpiece.

We ate at a place called Checchino dal 1887 in the neighborhood of Testaccio.

But as a famous actor once said when an assistant director apologized for making him wait in his trailer for a long period of time (I was told it was the great Richard Harris but I can’t be sure), “Please don’t apologize. It’s the waiting I get paid for. The acting I do for free.” I very much agree.

Although I was raised a Catholic, I never fully acquired the assurance of belief and therefore never really believed. Though I don’t miss going to church every Sunday, I do miss the certainty of ceremony and the security of reverence. But now, in the early winter of my years, it’s through nature, art, and my children that I experience reverence, and in moments around the table that I experience ceremony. All guilt-free.

I was finishing work and we went to eat at Checco Er Carettiere, a favorite restaurant of mine that I had not been to for many years.

Home-cooked food strengthens our bonds when we are together, keeps us connected when we are apart, and sustains the memory of us when we have passed away.

I guess sometimes you must be made extremely weak to find a strength you never knew you had.

The slower one becomes, the faster time moves. How? Why? Is it because we finally understand time and are now able to gauge how long we’ve got left? At the age of sixty-three I probably have another twenty years, thirty if I’m very lucky. But now, as opposed to when I was younger, I know what twenty years is. I know what thirty years is. They are nothing. Just a glimpse of life. So, one panics. Or I do. Therefore, I think of death often. Very often. Too often perhaps.

Over the next two days we ate at these restaurants: Uno Mas: Really good tapas. Library Street: Just great food in a lovely room. Fish Shop: Tiny place with about ten seats, including the counter. Amazing oysters. Amazing everything. Note: Bustling. Delicious. To have five varied and wonderful meals in a row in almost any city is not easy. But in Dublin it was.

We always pack pasta, canned tomato, beans, a five-liter can of our favorite olive oil, the largest saucepan I have, risotto rice, wine, booze, a set of kitchen tongs, and my favorite knife. (I stupidly forgot to pack Parmigiano and kosher salt.) We do this because those foodstuffs are our staples, and we bring the kitchenware because most houses, no matter how grand they are or how much you pay for them, have kitchens that are usually poorly outfitted, and inevitably we end up buying pans, colanders, etc., so now we just pack our own.

It is my family’s belief that the mince needs to have at least 30 percent fat for the meatballs to come out as they should. The highest fat content I have been able to find in a grocery store is 20 percent, at Marks & Spencer. However, the mince from a butcher at our farmers’ market seems to have a bit more, so I use that.

When someone you love dies, you absorb them. You take on their feelings and simultaneously experience life through their eyes and their heart as well as your own. In essence, you become them. This is not a conscious choice. It just happens. And it happens because one is not yet fully capable of accepting that person’s absence. It keeps them alive. Or at least it makes them less dead.

The hardest thing about aging is how quickly it happens and how slowly it occurs. I know that this has been said by someone before, but aging is the hands of a clock. We never see them move, but they do. You look away for what seems like just a moment and the next time you look back, it’s much later than you thought.

Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.

Afterward we gathered in the main dining area and Dmitri locked the door. He stood on a chair (we were forewarned that he does this often) and told us and the other customers that it was time for a party. From his precarious pulpit he spoke about the importance of food, of love, of his grandfather, and told us that we must drink, dance on the bar, and do whatever we wanted to do because we should “live in this moment.” He started to cry toward the end of his speech, but after composing himself, he exhorted us to enjoy life because “tomorrow is an illusion!” Unfortunately Dimitri is more than right.

Nicolo, Isabel, and Camilla dressed for Halloween as the Marx Brothers and it breaks my heart every time I look at it. But I must say that what is even more heartbreaking is that out of the countless houses we went to that night, only one person recognized who they were dressed as. Only one guy knew who the Marx Brothers were! I realized then that Halloween was becoming worse than ever, and that cinema was dead.

I had drunk Guinness before in bars stateside but the taste of those two half pints in Dublin was something revelatory. I told my friend it was like drinking an eight-course meal, not because it was filling but because of the complexity of the flavors. The Guinness we drank with Yvonne on that blustery day tasted the same. Rich, deep, dark, joyful, melancholic, comforting; a flawless liquid fermented in history and myth.