Stanley Tucci gets very personal

you sent to me. Perhaps you also know that after his death, I dedicated much of my time to raising money for cancer research and spreading the word about the importance of getting screened. Hi, everybody, Here we are in my kitchen. It's about eighteen hours plus before I get my first call Inoscopy, and I also co founded with the number of other strong willed women, Stand Up to Cancer.

It's been incredibly gratifying, but losing a partner and losing the father of my daughters isn't something you ever really get over, and frankly, it was and still is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't gone through it how excruciating it is to watch someone you love deteriorate. No, they can't know what it's like they can never know what it's like. Stanley Tucci understands. He lost his wife Kate to breast cancer in two thousand nine and became a member of a unique club of widows and widowers

people who understand. So when I recently interviewed Stanley about his charming new memoir called Taste My Life Through Food, I wanted to ask him about his own recently disclosed cancer diagnosis, as well as our shared experience of losing our partners and co parents. Stanley and Kate had three kids together when their mom was diagnosed. She was diagnosed at stage four I mean, which unfortunately is is too common, and there was you know, she struggled for four years.

My husband was diagnosed at stage four two. It was and you know, it was just so sick and uh, you know, only live for nine months. So I totally relate to that. And you keep thinking, well, you have to be really really sick to get really really to get well. But you keep hoping against hope that well, yeah, maybe you'll be that small percentage of people who respond, or maybe a new treatment will come along that will also you know, keep you going until an even better

treatment comes along. Um. I write a lot about that in my book and how I was sort of in death denial. But we'll talk about that another time we are I was. I was too. I was completely in death denial, even though you know you see it coming, you know what's going to happen, but you just don't want to acknowledge it. And I think there's something weird about protecting the person, and then you wonder is it

is it protecting them or is it misleading them? And you know, I have all sorts of regrets about that, UM, but I think it's pretty common actually, that it's it's too hard to face face reality. And I think as a society or even the medical profession needs to needs to help people. Because I always thought if we talked about Jay's death, that meant we were giving up hope, and I just didn't. I felt like to rob him of hope would rob him of any any small pleasures

he was getting out of his life. I don't know if you felt that way too. I did, of course I felt that I feel exactly the same way. And in the end, you know, the person who's sick is the person who is most truthful. And it was very hard.

She she knew. I mean, she knew. And there was this one moment that was very specific when we came out of this one doctor's office and you know, they had shown that there were lesions on her brain, and we both just knew that sort of that was it was making that its natural progression, the disease, and at the last place it goes as the brain. And so we had been incapable of stopping that. And when we sat in the car and you know, she started crying and she said, I want to die, and I said,

I know, I know you're not going to die. And then you just keep moving forward from there. But I knew that most likely, yes, she would die, and she knew, and yet you couldn't discuss it. No, we discussed it to a certain extent, and then you know, then we moved on and we did keep we would talk about it, but you can only talk about it for so long. And then and I remember going and talking about her will and life insurance and all that stuff with the lawyer,

and it was just terrible. And she was very matter of fact about it, because you had because she had to be anyway. Anyway, I was sort of I was sort of a practitioner and of toxic positivity. You know, like Jay had brain mets too, uh, And I remember we went to the doctor. Yeah, he had Uh. It traveled from north it was marching northward from his liver to his long He had a tumor on the back of his eye, and then he had brain mets in

pretty short order. And every time, you know, the cancer would further metastasize, I would say, don't worry, we'll figure it out, or okay, we'll get radiation. And it was just the only way I knew how to keep going. Of course, and here's the thing is that we can say that, oh, we're giving the person false hope, or we're giving ourselves false hope. But how else, how else do you go on? If you just give up, If you just give up, what happens, what happens to the kids,

what happens to the person who's sick? You can't. You have to keep trying. Unfortunately, we don't have the science, We don't have the tools to save anybody who's suffering like that, so we we but we implement them anyway, and that in some ways makes it even worse, because there is no point to doing whole brain radiation. What would be the point of that it doesn't work right? What would be the point of you have eleven lesions on your brain, We're going to target each one of them,

but we know it's basically going to come back. So we have to get to a point where the medical community and the victims and their families make it, make decisions together and not just go, oh no, we're gonna just do this whole brain radiation with you and completely kill your is it your make delay for word so that what happens is then from what I was told, there's no connection between your body and your brain. So the whole thing falls apart. And that's because of the radiation.

So why do you do it? Why are we doing it? And and not to mention in certain countries like America, the expense of it and that is really disturbing. We have to figure out a way, first of all, to cure it. Second of all that people need to be able to make a decision and go I'm not going to do that because it can make it even worse. And some people do, but I think more often than not people die trying. Right there, you go, well, I'm

so sorry, Katie, I'm so sorry. I know it's been a long time for you, m h and for me too, but you never you never get over it. When we come back, we dive into Stanley's memoir, his passion for food, and his own cancer diagnosis that's right after this. In addition to all of his acting accolades, Stanley Tucci is the author of two cookbooks, The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, which he co wrote with his wife, Felicity Blunt.

The two married in and have two children together. Stanley knows his way around food writing, so when the book publisher Simon and Schuster approached him to write another book, he figured he had it covered. I always thought that it would sort of take the form of observations, musings, some experiences, some recipes, um. And then when I when I spoke to them, when I spoke bok to them, they said, they said, you know, don't we would really like to have like a memoir. And I was like,

what you talk I can't do that. I don't want to do that. And they said, well, would you give it a try and see, because just try it. So I tried it and and that, and I ended up with this, but so It was never my intention really to write a memoir. What was it like the process for you? Well, it was It was strange because I I felt like I kept saying the felicity. I kept saying, I don't I don't know that I really have enough to say, and I think I'm I only have this

many pages. You know, I don't have had nothing left. I don't know. If she goes, stand stop it, think about when remember the story you told me about the blah blah blah. But you remember when you told me that when you were young and this happened and you were that thing that your mother made and the blah blah blah or what about the And I said, oh, oh, yeah, you think that would be interesting? She goes yes, So I just go back and write, you know, but it

was great. I really needed her to to help me, because, well, you doubt yourself and you're afraid of boring people. Well, let's talk about the book, because I know you use food really too as the engine for the narrative instead of film, which obviously has played an equally important role in your life. And I wondered about that until I came to the last chapter and I read about you know, your cancer diagnosis. I don't want to dwell on it, because I imagine Stanley, you don't want to dwell on it.

But it was pretty shocking when I read that. How did that inform sort of what you wrote, even though you would always plan to write about food. Did it take a different tenor or tone as a result of what you had experienced which sounds absolutely awful by the way, Yeah, it's pretty awful. I'm not gonna lie. Uh, and anybody who's been through it, and then a lot a lot of people have been through this kind of cancer. Um, yeah, it's it's very unpleasant. And you know I still suffer

from the the effects of the radiation. Well, I still can't eat everything I want to eat. I certainly can't eat anything spicy. I have difficulty. I still don't have enough saliva. So you can't just sort of go, I'll eat that sandwich. You know, eating that sandwich takes quite a while, so you're constantly drinking water and you know, trying to have enough from some sort of condiment to help you through it. Um, and certain things you can eat,

no problem, that's not a problem. So you know, as I said in the book, I lived mostly on a vegetarian diet for a long time because I couldn't eat meat on so it's mostly soft foods and all that. And it's still, it's still. I have to gravitate towards towards that. And you had it, which is which is fine. It was a tumor, a squamous cell tumor at the base of your tongue. Yeah, and your jaw started hurting like excruciating right painted your jaw. Yeah, for two years.

Why didn't you get it checked before? Well? I did. The problem is it was missed, and I don't know how it was missed. I had a prominent U E n t here look at it. Uh, I had I had to scan. I had um a friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon and a colleague of his in New York. I had done all over the world and it was missed. And then eventually I was like, oh, I don't know

what this is. I was getting acupuncture, it was getting the sun as it was doing all these things, and suddenly that finally the tumor just got so big that I was sent to this fee sent me to this guy was a salivary gland doctor. But obviously deals with cancer, and he just opened up my mouth and within a second he went, oh my god, you're this huge tumor. Um So, I hadn't had a scan for quite a

while and the original scan missed it. Um So anyway, Um, it was unfortunate, but it was fortunate in the sense that we got it in time and that it had not metastasized. It was fortunate, and I mean I was so relieved. You know, Um, there are so many different kinds of cancers, with so many different kind of prognoses. And the fact that the treatment you had at Mount Sinai, which was radiation very specific to the region and chemotherapy I read, had a success rate. Thank god. Um, that's

the good news. Getting there, however, was not half the fun, because it was extremely excruciating the treatment with the radiation and the chemo, and it was a two year treatment, Stanley, Is that right? No, no, no, no, The treatment was only thirty five days. The the result of the treatment, the effects of the treatment three years on now, so it's three over three years since I finished treatment and I'm still not back to normal. What what were some of the what were some of the side effects you

lose your taste and smell. But you don't lose it. What happens is everything that you smell on, everything that you taste tastes like you know what, and to the point where you can't. Um. You can't. If someone has eaten and they've walked in to the room, you have to just say, get out of the room. I can't stand it. Oh no, you can't. If you open the refrigerator. Normally you open a refrigerator, what do you smell? You know, unless something is open, it's been there for what do

you smell? Nothing? It's a refrigerator keeps things cooled. The odors get sort of numbed, right. I opened a refrigerator at that point, and when I'm getting through treatment and finishing treatment, and it was, as I wrote in the book, a wall of stink. It was incredible. I couldn't be near anything that, no matter what it was. UM. I was so nauseous that I could just all I could do was lay in bed. I was so nauseous from

the radiation. You're in terrible pain because it's destroying all the seft tissue in your mouth, and you have you're riddled with ulcers. UM plus you're just in pain, so you're taking morphine, you're on fentanyl patches. You can't swallow even water, so you have to then hydrate yourself, either through intravenous or I finally had a feeding tube put in after five weeks, and I stayed with that feeding tube for six months. You lost thirty pounds and you

needed to get nourishments. So you had that kind of feeding tube that you put I think that it's called something like a peg, like a peg or something, and I can't remember something like that. So you had to get get nourishment through a feeding tube. And you know, as I hear you describe this, Stanley, it's like such a cruel irony for someone who gets so much pleasure from food, whose very existence seems to be colored in

the most beautiful way by food and drink. And um, did that strike you at the time, like w T F Yeah, yeah, hello, I mean really, any other part of me please take it, you know, but not that, Please not that. And I thought I was so afraid. I thought, well, I'm never going to be able to eat again. I'm never gonna be able to share a great meal, to cook a great meal with my family, and or friends. That is really my my life, my life.

Um So, Also, it was quite ironic that CNN came to me and I was just like six months out of treatment and CNN came to me and said, do you have any ideas for a show, And I said, well, I have this idea. And I had three different ideas and they were all involved. One was about cancer, the other was about uh refugees and food, and then I gave them this idea was an idea I've had for

a long time. I'm Stanley Tucci, I'm Italian on both sides, and I'm traveling across Italy to discover how the food in each of this country's twenty regions is as unique as the people in their past. You know, we made the deal, we found a production because we started making it and there I am shooting in Italy and I'm still not able to eat a lot of stuff. I can taste everything at that point, but there's a lot

of stuff that I still can't swallow. So I started to show like a little over a year after treatment, and I honestly don't even know how I did it. Were you faking it? Where you were in some instances where you like, oh that's really good. No, no, no, I could taste it, so I didn't. There was never a lie there. But there's no question that they had to. They would. I would ask them to cut away, or I would turn myself away and I have to take something out of my mouth because I was going to

choke on it. That's insane, Stanley terrible. Was it? Was it therapeutic though, doing that documentary series, because I don't know, you've got to get away from what you've been through and and do something you loved even though you were compromised. Yes, it was very I think it was therapeutic, and it was. It was incredibly incredibly positive. It was a difficult experience, not only because I was compromised, which is simply said logistically,

it's a very difficult thing to do. We've we've refined it now so we're better at it. I'm about to go start again to do three more episodes, and we have a a really wonderful group of people put together, and you know, so we're it's gonna be a little

more efficient, I think, um, But yes, it was. It was something that I've never done before, obviously, and and it was a story that I always wanted to tell and so I felt good about that, and I felt good that I was up out and about what else kind of got you through that period of because it does sound like hell. I imagine Felicity was unbelievable in in that instance too. Yeah, she got me through it. I mean she got me through it. She found the

doctor I was. You know, I was really adamant that I was not going to do standard of care because I saw what happened to Kate, and I had met a lot of doctors that I didn't trust. I met a lot I did trust, but I didn't trust the system. However, when as you said before, when we look at the statistics, you look at that prognosis, you look at those numbers, you go like, you have to be kind of an idiot if you don't do that. And I just wanted to get better. Um, I'm still a believer in a

certain alternative treatments and supplements and things like that. But I think if you you just have every cancer is different, as you know, and do you just have to look at what what do you have? What are the what what's the standard of care? What are the statistics? And are you going to do that or are you going to augment it with something else? Are you're just gonna do something else? And I think that people forget that

it's their body. They should be able to do what they want, but they get afraid and they suddenly are just doing something that might kill them before the cancer kills. It's a very imperfect situation when it comes to cancer therapies.

You know, so often they're diagnosed sole late. You know, you're lucky and that there was a treatment option that was quite successful and and that it hadn't metastasized, because I think the horrible thing about cancer is it's so often diagnosed when it's when you're symptomatic, and you're usually symptomatic when it's you know, a very serious situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that you know, that's a really it's such a tragedy. I think people are becoming much more aware of it now.

People are getting tested, you know, for you know, your prostate is getting checked, your vowels are getting checked, your everything is getting checked much much more frequently now, and cancer screenings are happening much more frequently now. The thing is they simply have to be made available and accessible and affordable to agree, and they're not in this country. It's much better in America. In America, we know that

doesn't if you don't have insurance, that's it. Well, I'm really working hard with Stand Up to Cancer and some of my other efforts because, um, not only do this methods have to be available, they have to be uh you know, not couse prohibitive to your point. And um, you know, there still aren't enough screening tests for things like pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer. There are many cancers that are such silent killers, um, that we need to really figure out how we identify them at an early stage

and then treat them as soon as possible. And you know, during the pandemic Stanley, a lot of people had to forego or out of choice, didn't want to get screened, and that is going to translate, sadly into many more cancer mortality. So, um, you know, I'm always preaching, you know. And and a friend of mine was saying, when it comes to fixing the healthcare system, just make sure that people are able to see a doctor once a year. Imagine how many things could be eliminated if that is

just part of everyone's you know, standard of care. Yes, I agree. The problem is that we don't. We don't. We don't have that. The more you know UM, the better informed you are, the more proactive you can be, and ultimately the healthier you'll be. It would save gazillions of dollars were people simply to have a physical every year that was completely free for them. And then you go from there and the proper tests, right, the proper screening,

the proper tests, the proper screening. I think that also there's very some interesting stuff has been coming out of all this COVID UH horror UH and the way that they were able to fast track the vaccines and everything UM. And I think with with AI, they're they're going to be able to screen for things and find things now much more quickly, much more effici much more affordably than ever before UM, and create new tests to find things

where you won't have to get a scan. They'll be able to find it your blood, They'll be able to find it in whatever. I'm gonna move on from the cancer. But the one thing I also I want to keep talking about it. The one thing I wondered and worried about is your children having lost their mom a decade earlier. You know, in the course, I live in fear of this, Stanley, because I have to daughters and they were six and

two when their dad died. Uh, and that had to go through your mind, not to mention the fact that you were about to become a father for the fifth time. As Rod Stewart once told me, Stanley, when I asked him, Rod, what are you doing having all these babies at your age, he goes, They're still letting the old pencil locate. Oh god, Oh my god. Well, Jesus, there's an image now that I have in my head forever. Thanks a lot. I'm so sorry, No, in all seriousness, because I just took

this in a very different direction family. But I mean as a dad and as a widower honestly, And uh, this must have been been very tough for your kids. Yeah, it was hard for them. The older kids were very um. Yeah, I knew it was really hard for them. But they I could feel them just pull back, um to protect themselves, and that made perfect sense, and they'd be very sweet and very nice. But I knew that they were like, I don't don't want it. I don't want to know.

All I want to do is hope. And I completely understood that, um, and I because I was really not accessible to them. They were just watching this like practically sort of skeletal creature walk around complaining, UM and telling them to believe that they had eaten anything. Yeah don't, what did you do? You smell horrible? Um. And but yeah, it was really hard with Mateo. I knew Matteo, who was three at the time. UM, it was hard for him too because he saw me not engage, like completely disengaged,

and he didn't really fully understand it. And as I was healing, I remember one time going to try to read to him in bed and I couldn't even read a story to him. I mean this was, you know, a few months after treatment, and I couldn't. I didn't have the energy to read destroy My voice wasn't strong enough to read an entire children's book. UM. And it was hard. And about a year later or so, I remember him crying one night and telling me that he was afraid that I was going to die. That he

really knew. I mean, because they know. I mean, you know, we're animals. We know when somebody's sick. We feel it, we smell it, you know, we sense it. And he knew, and now now it's fine. Now it's fine. Now he just hurls abusive me. It's fine. When we come back, we dig into a very important subject, Stanley's friendship with Ryan Reynolds, plus excerpts and how to from Stanley's book Stay Tuned. I'm very jealous that you're such good friends

with Ryan Reynolds. I'm jealous too. I'm jealous about it, yet another reason I want to be Stanley too. She but, how did you guys get to know each other? Because Emily and Felicity are sisters, I should mention, but and then he acted with with Emily? Or how did you guys get No, we were I was in Westchester. We were if thee had moved in. Felicity had moved in to live with me and the kids for two years, and you know, we weren't quite sure. I thought I

was really gonna end up living there with Felicity. And after two years she was like, no, I don't think so. I think we're gonna move back to England. And but while we were there, Emily emailed Fee and she said, you know Blake Lively. You know I spent some time with Blake Lively and she's really fun, really wonderful. And Ryan, and why you know, they're literally two miles from your house. Why don't you here's her email. We started emailing. We

got together within thirty minutes. We were I felt like I had known them forever. Within a week, my kids, who were, you know, like eleven and thirteen at the time, we're sleeping over at their house. Um, well, I realized. Ryan reminded me that we had been in a movie together so many years ago, when he was like nineteen or something. I don't have no recollection of it. And um, anyway,

we just became the closest friends. And then soon after that, very soon after that, we moved, but we've remained great, great friends. You took him to the doctor and tell us set that scene for us, Okay, Well, I didn't want him to come. I was staying. I flew back to New York. It was for my six months, uh scam. So I flew back to New York, and I was staying with them in the apartment, and I think Blake was away. Blake was away working and Ryan was there, so it's just me and Ryan, and he goes, do

you want me to come with you? And I said no, and Felicity I kept saying to me Stanley because she couldn't come. She said, Stanley, I want someone to be with you. And I was like, no, I don't want anyone with me. I'll be fine, it's fine, no matter what the news is, it'll be fine. She said no. And then she Ryan said I really want to come with you, and I said, no, you're not coming with me. It'll be fine, don't worry about it. Of course, Felicity

had spoken to him unbeknownst to me. I had written this in the book, but I cut it out where she said you need to go with him, and he was like, I know, I do. I'm gonna go. So then he convinced me that he never told me that. Uh, he said, Okay, I'm gonna He was so sweet. He was like, I'm getting you a car. You're gonna go up there, and I'm you just call me when you're when you're about to go in, and then I'll come up.

And so I I called him, and he came up and of course walked into the room where I was getting the news, and the entire staff was beside themselves, and both male and female, and I mean it was. It was quite it was quite something, and he was so sweet when they gave me the news that you know, you've got the all clear, there's no evidence of disease, and he started crying. I didn't cry. I was I

didn't know what to feel except happy. But he started crying, which made the nurses faul even more in love with him. I know, I know. And the woman who was one of the oncologists she had to she I said, can I take out the feeding who? And they were like, yeah, let's wait for the doctor. I said, I don't want to wait for the doctor. I don't want to wait for the feeding to guy. Can we just get it out? And they go, yeah, I just actually pull it out.

So she so she said, oh, I'll do it, and she started doing it, and because I knew how it worked, she just started pulling and I was like, wait, you can't, don't. What are you doing? She goes, no, I'm taking it out. I go, you have to deflate the balloon in order to get it out of me. She goes, oh my god, yes, you're am sorry. I forgot but I think she was so flummixed by what's his name? You know that you know.

Oh God, anyway, it was all fun. I do want to just get back to some of the wonderful things since we had such an intense, serious conversation about this Dai. Yeah, we did. But about sort of the love of food that that you have in this book, and you m you talk about a lot of recipes. I love your

your drink recipes. I was going to make one and just sip it while we had our conversation, especially the grony, which I think your last line is take a sip and feel the sunshine in your inside or something like that, or become a new person with your martini. Um. But but you do talk about the liveliness of an Italian Christmas, and I thought if you could read chapter seven, it's in a section called Christmas Day that starts upon hearing

the sound of tires. But maybe why don't you just kind of set the Yeah, yeah, so on Christmas Day. In my house growing up, there was a dish called timpano that we used as the centerpiece of the film and Big Night of the of the Meal and Big Night. And Timpano is a very complicated dish, very old fashioned dish, is very heavy dish. It sounds like a nightmare. Can I just say it sounds like a nightmare to make? Why would anybody want to make this dish? Because it's

really good for certain people. I love it. Most people don't like it, but I love it. So this dishes, it's incredibly heavy, it takes a long time to make, it's very delicate, it's very temperamental um, and it's very hard to eat anything else with it because it's so big. So the meal timing of the meal gets thrown off, and it's every cook's nightmare. Can you explain what it is before you read this? Yeah, it's a big It's

basically like um. If you were to take like a pasta dough or a pasta like dough, and you lay it, you roll it out to it a sizeable circle, and you put it into like a lake lake cruise or something like that, you don't like a Dutch heaven or an enamel basin, and then you fill it with CT, You fill it with a meat based rugoo, You fill it with um, salami, provolone cheese, you fill it with little meatballs, you fill it with hard boiled eggs, egg yolk,

and this rugou, as I said, and Pecardino romano cheese. So it's very salty, it's very h heavy, uh, And so you cook it, you cover it up with the with the dough, you cook it, then when you take it out, you flip it over, you take off the pot hopefully, and what you're presented with is basically something looks like a timpani drum, hence the name timpano. Um. You let it cool and then you slice it like a cake and you see all the sort of layers

of everything that you've put in. It's very beautiful. As I said, it's it's like cilantro. Do you either love it or you hate it. So this was made every Sunday. It's a very particular taste. But my it was just a tradition. But you can't time a meal with it because it's very fickle. So anything else you cook afterwards, like the work, yeah, who cares. But also you can't eat it because you're too full from the thing from the timpano and and you can't time a ham or

a goose or a whatever. So Kate would get wasn't very happy about that, and Felicity I thought, really might be okay with it. She felt exactly the same way, So anyway, I'll read this. So my parents would bring this all the time. My mother doesn't really even care for timpana. My father is the one who loves it. So this is what. So we think that we wake up on Christmas morning, You're gonna languish with the kids a little bit, hang around and play with toy no No.

Upon hearing the sound of car tires on the gravel drive, and a moment later the shouts of Merry Christmas from my parents mouths, I would sheapestly look at Kate. She would sigh quietly, and then as she slowly turned and stared at me, I would see something die in her eyes. At this point, my anxiety level would skyrocket, and I'd flit off to the bar see if I couldn't find liquid calm in a bloody Mary or a Scotch sour. Laden with gifts and platters of food, including the Pisto

Resistance shrouded in a large dishcloth. This is the tympana. My elegantly dressed parents would climb the stairs, smiling from ear to ear, as thrilled to see us, as if we'd all been separated for decades, when in fact We had only just seen them the night before. They were so happy and excited. How could I even think of being put out by their extremely early arrival. Well, perhaps not so much media as my poor wife. I will tell you how the Timpano you featured The Timpano and

Big Night, which you wrote and directed. Did you direct Big Night? Yeah? I co wrote it with my cousin and co directed it with Campbell Scott. Was that a homage to Kate Stanley we're here in the book The Timpano No Big Night? Oh no, No, it was just you know, my cousin and I. It just seemed like the right choice because it is so difficult, and it's only you know, an accomplished chef would attempt such a thing.

And that's why we put it in because the character of Primo, played by Tony Shalhoub, would always just make things more difficult than they had to be. Tim Oh is it Boston? No with a specially grass now? And it is a shape like like a drum, like a Timpani drum, and the Hindu side, please my God, all of the most important things in the world. Speaking of difficult Italians, you write in your book that they can be very dogmatic when it comes to food, and uh,

certainly with the Timpano that's the case in point. But there seems to be a right way of doing things and then the other way of doing so we thought we'd have some fun, uh with with Stanley Tuccie how to little food and life lessons based on the dogmatic Italian ways. So here, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Stanley Tucci's how to. Let's start easy and I love this idea. It's brilliant. Why didn't I ever think of how to butter corn? Mm hm? Oh? The best exploit, Katie.

I'm telling you it's incredible. Throw some nice salted butter on a beautiful warm piece of bread. Doesn't even actually have to be warm, and not like a cheap piece of bread, like a really nice piece of Italian better French bread. Salt your corn and then butter your corn with that buttered bread. Then you basically have like two meals in your hand. That's genius, Stanley, It's genius. Why why hasn't that caught on? I don't know, but maybe it will now. Yeah, I'm going to try it the

next time I have corn on the cob. You're also quite specific and picky about what pasta goes with what sauce. Yeah, do tell when you go to Italy. They're very specific. So if you say, oh, I'd love to have the bully, can I have that with star pasta? I mean what they'll do? Can you can I have that with Postina? You know they'll just pick you up and throw you

out of the restaurant. I mean, there are so many stories I've heard of of of restaurant tours of chefs going sorry, I can't give you that, and the person goes, but I'm the customer. You're like, they go not anymore, get out. So what goes with what? Stanley? Well, let's say, having learned the original recipe in Boulogne and bullion is probably just one of the greatest sauces in the world.

But the original recipe for bulloing is is very quite different than what we know of, but it's normally served. Both versions would be normally served with fresh maybe or even a strong dried pasta like uh Rigatoni or something like that. That because it's a it's a substantial sauce, so you want something that's going to support it. Um I would not do it with something like you don't

do it with spaghetti. It doesn't work. And in England they always have they have a thing called spag bowl which is spaghetti bolo, but spaghetti bolon is it doesn't exist. And if you try to order that in Bologna, no it's not gonna happen. You need to tell those those Brits that they're not doing it right. No, no, they're so not. And and finally, um that you also talk about how to prepare main lobster, which is something that

that Kate's fan only put it would put together. Um, And I guess there's really only one perfect way to eat to prepare main lobster, isn't there? I think so? So you have to use the water from the the waters of Maine, the sea water and seaweed and do it over a fire in a big pot. Throw in those lobsters when the water is boiling, put the seaweed on top, put corn on top of that seaweed on top of the corn. Boil it for I have no idea how long, six minutes maybe, and take it out

and eat it and it's incredible. For more how to recipes and stories from everyone's favorite Italian Stallion go buy Stanley tucciese book Taste My Life Through Food, which is out now and by the way, we're officially in the public Asian month of my book called Going There. There's still time to pre order, and if you'd like to join me on tour, you can go to ticketmaster dot com slash Going There to find out where I'll be

traveling and to get your tickets. Next Question with Katie Kurik is a production of I Heart Media and Katie Currik Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Curic, and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements, Adriana Fasio, and Emily Pinto. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter,

wake Up Call, go to Katie currect dot com. You can also find me at Katie Curic on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.