Though Stanley Tucci is a Hollywood A-lister, starring alongside Ralph Fiennes in this year’s Oscar-contending Conclave, for instance, and in crowd pleasers such as the Hunger Games films, he has cooked up a public persona somehow more associated with food than acting. Tucci has honed a character as a famous epicure that rivals the ones he portrays on film. Few of Tucci’s 5 million Instagram followers are invested in his life today because they fondly recall his Golden Globe-winning role in Conspiracy (2001). They want to know what he is eating.

In 2021, he published Taste, a memoir that dwelled more on family dinners than industry dramas. Now, in What I Ate in One Year, Tucci narrows his scope to record one year of journal entries. The collective product is in equal measures public memoir, personal diary, and casual cookbook — supplemented by some poetry in the margins.