TO appreciate how much food means to the actor Stanley Tucci and his extended family, you have to hear the stories about his maternal grandmother, Concetta Tropiano, who pickled her own tomatoes, canned her own pears, curdled her own ricotta, brewed her own beer and fattened her own chickens, rabbits and goats in Verplanck, N.Y., about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan.


You have to hear in particular about her doughy twilight, when death came knocking but she was too busy with focaccia to answer the door.


This was in the mid-1990s, when she was in her late 80s. A stroke mostly paralyzed her left arm, limiting her kitchen work. She nonetheless insisted on doing something as she recovered, and used the kneading of dough as therapy, the making of pizza — and focaccia — as rehabilitation.


About a year after the stroke, a devastating infection forced the amputation of her left leg. Relatives gathered to comfort her as she emerged from surgery.


“To cheer her up, we asked her to tell us, again, how to make stuffed artichokes,” recalled Joan Tucci, her daughter and Stanley’s mother. “She went through the whole thing.”


“I thought the nurse was going to die,” Mrs. Tucci added. “Only an Italian would talk about food at a time like this.”


Mrs. Tucci lost her mother in 1997, when Mrs. Tropiano was 88. But Mrs. Tropiano’s legacy endures, in part through “The Tucci Cookbook,” a paean to Italian cooking — and to Italian-American families — that is being published next week.


It includes recipes from the Tropiano and Tucci sides of the clan, both of which have roots in Calabria, in southern Italy. It reflects the year in the early 1970s when Joan Tucci and her husband, Stanley Sr., temporarily moved their children to Florence, became familiar with northern Italian cooking and fell hard for lasagne verde. It bows to “Big Night,” a 1996 movie, set in an Italian-American restaurant, that Stanley Tucci not only acted in but also helped write and direct. The movie, in fact, inspired a previous, shorter, less glossy version of “The Tucci Cookbook,” titled “Cucina & Famiglia.”


But beyond all of that, “The Tucci Cookbook,” in which the recipes are interlaced with reminiscences from two generations of Tuccis, suggests the meaty, saucy ways in which a love of food can bind and govern a family. That love has certainly shaped Stanley Tucci’s life and career, in which cooking and eating seem to be the glues for every relationship, the sidebars to every adventure, the grace notes of every achievement.


“Big Night,” an exuberant celebration of culinary obsession, helped put him on the map in Hollywood. More than a decade later, “Julie & Julia,” in which he played Julia Child’s husband, cemented his reputation as one of the movie business’s nimblest character actors.


He recalled that before that movie was shot he told Meryl Streep, who played Ms. Child: “You and I need to cook together. I don’t mean to be a nudge and I don’t mean to be Method-y, but we need to be in a kitchen together.” At Ms. Streep’s apartment in Manhattan, they prepared a proper French dinner, with a main course of blanquette de veau and, for dessert, a tarte Tatin.


Mr. Tucci, 51, is a proud and avid cook, and at his home in northern Westchester County, not far from Concetta Tropiano’s old stamping grounds, his arsenal of equipment trumps what many restaurants have on hand. In addition to the six burners and acres of counter space in his kitchen, there’s a mammoth stone pizza oven, made in Italy, on the patio outside, along with a gas grill as large as a Fiat, a free-standing paella pan the size of a wading pool, and a coffinlike wood-and-aluminum roasting box, called a Caja China, that can accommodate up to 100 pounds of meat. He likes his dinner parties populous and his friends carnivorous.


Widowed in 2009, he remarried in August, and when he and his bride, Felicity Blunt, 31, tell the story of their courtship, it’s a bloody, gristly narrative.