Dave Wood

On the face of it, my late father Harold Wood doesn’t have much in common with one of my favorite actor-producer-commentators. Dad spent his life working as a farmer, butter maker, factory worker, bartender and bookkeeper, to keep the wolves away from our door located in a little town very few people ever heard of.

Tucci, on the other hand, has wowed filmgoers in movies like “Big Night,’’ “Julie and Julia,” and more recently found an even larger audience with his TV network documentaries about Italy, its cuisine and culture. He’s a bon vivant and comfortable in “faraway places with strange sounding names, calling, calling viewers like me.”

Of late my Beautiful Wife is becoming concerned about my growing unwillingness to read thick volumes after a long career as a book reviewer. So, knowing my enthusiasm for Tucci, she brought home from our wonderful public library Stanley Tucci’s new autobiography, “What I Ate in One Year” (Simon and Schuster). It chronicles a daily life of Tucci, his wife and his five kids for one year as they travel the world…preparing and eating good food and sometimes not so good. Tucci turns out to be effacing, admitting his prejudices, how a spat with wife can spoil his appetite. I can’t put this book down, especially when he reminds me of my humble tradesman father, who worried us kids when he became a widower and subsisted on what he always insisted was “the edible incredible egg.” Whenever we suggested a more varied diet, he invariably got on the phone and called his childhood pal, farmer Henry Sygulla and placed his weekly order of four dozen brown eggs. Which he would ingest morning, noon and night, washed down with whole milk, buttered toast and Puffed Rice (“shot from guns”). Once we bought him a subscription to Meals on Wheels, which he responded to with his first taste of under-steamed broccoli, saying “I’m not fond of eating trees, so I’ll stick with eggs. They are very economical, and they are DELICIOUS.”

That memory was stirred up when I read the words of international gourmet Tucci, who recounts his daily regimen of three squares a day often featuring codfish Livornese, Spaghetti con Tonno, Pasta con pajata di vitello a latte (baby calf intestines in tomato sauce, not everyone’s cup of Ragu!) and worries that his youngest daughter, 4, only likes to eat buttered pasta.

And then I got to his page 55: 

“During my workout I kept thinking about eggs and how I was going to prepare them for breakfast. The egg. In Latin, ovum. The egg is always on my mind. I love it, them. I love the shape of them and I really love to eat them. In any form. Fried, scrambled, poached, soft-boiled, hard-boiled, as a Spanish tortilla, as a frittata, as an omelet, scotched, coddled, “quiche,” dropped and so on. They are practically the perfect food.

“Sometimes I go to You Tube and watch Jacques Pepin make an omelet just because it’s so beautiful to watch him do it. He makes it look so easy and I can imagine how good it tastes. I wish I could make an omelet like Jacques Pepin. I wish I could make anything like Jacques Pepin. In short I really love eggs. And Jacques Pepin.”

Unlike many chefs, Tucci sprinkles his book with tossed-together sandwiches of whatever he finds in his fridge, “washed down with an ice-cold beer,” which leads me to believe he might enjoy saltines smeared with cannibal meat washed down with ice-cold Leinenkugel’s alongside my father at Hank & Anne’s on the Main Street of a town he’s never heard of, where it’s not known as Bouef Tartare—but always includes a raw egg.