Stanley Tucci: ‘Why would you want to stop making pastina?’

“It’s one of the first food memories I think I have.” Stanley Tucci is telling me just how far back his memories of eating tiny, star-shaped pastina, go.

“It’s incredibly comforting. My mom would put it in soups and stuff like that… when you got sick in an Italian family you usually had pastina.”

Not that this is a foodstuff reserved just for kids, under the weather or otherwise. “For a midnight snack there can’t be anything better than pastina with butter and cheese,” says Tucci wistfully.

Why am I speaking to Tucci, the respected actor, filmmaker, author and food obsessive about pastina in particular? Well, earlier this year pasta brand Ronzoni announced it would be discontinuing its star-shaped pastina (known as stelline pastina in Italian) in the US leading to an outpouring of – let’s say it as it is – devastation amongst fans – #pastina has over 170m TikTok views at time of writing. Having previously worked together with S.Pellegrino on a meal kit featuring Tucci’s own exclusive recipes, he and the brand thought this would be the perfect opportunity to create something to bring a little cheer to pastina lovers.

The result is S.Pellegrino Stelline, a limited edition pastina created in collaboration with premium Italian pasta brand Rummo. Fans can get it as part of a new holiday recipe kit featuring two of Tucci’s family recipes: brodo di gallina con polpettine di pollo, a chicken soup with meatballs and pastina, and pastina classica with butter and cheese, Tucci’s favourite midnight snack. It’s helpful of course that S.Pellegrino’s logo just happens to be… a star.

“We wanted to do another meal kit and then [S.Pellegrino] said, ‘You know, there's this shortage of pastina’. I can't imagine why you would want to stop making pastina but I guess there wasn't a market for it, but now it seems like there is because there's an outcry.”

The two recipes in the S.Pellegrino Presents: Stanley Tucci’s Stelline Two Ways kit, which has been curated by World Chef/YumCrunch and includes fresh ingredients, premium Italian products, two bags of pastina and a bottle of S.Pellegrino, are fairly faithful to Tucci’s childhood eats too.

“They're close to the original recipes, you're always changing and adapting them but for the most part you know, you're making a chicken broth. And you're making these little meatballs. You can make them with dark meat, you can make them with white meat. It's a really very straightforward recipe that's been around forever and it's one so many Italians make. So many different families basically make a version of this recipe. It’s incredibly comforting. It's a great appetiser before a meal. And then you have the pastina with burro [butter] and cheese and it's delicious – again great comfort food.”

Tucci obviously gets a great deal of joy from cooking, his love of the kitchen stemming from his mother and grandmother – “They were very similar. And I'm very similar. They're just better than I am,” he says of their cooking skills. And when it comes to the Thanksgiving table there are a few essentials.

“S.Pellegrino I pair with basically everything because it's so good. Even before I started working with them, we drank it. It just kind of makes everything better. When you're talking about Thanksgiving, you always have to have a turkey, the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, and the right gravy.” Based in the UK, Tucci will often cook the meal for British friends “who just love Thanksgiving because they don't have it here.”

Growing up as an Italian-American in the State of New York, Tucci spent a great deal of time around the table. But what makes the Italian table so special in his opinion, during the holidays or at any time?

“The Italian table to me, well it's incredibly straightforward. And the recipes are really simple. And Italian cooking doesn't rely on anything as much as it does fresh seasonal ingredients and an understanding of how to put those together in very simple ways.”

The two recipes in the S.Pellegrino Stelline recipe kit are perfect examples of the Italian philosophy then, to be enjoyed during the holidays, or whenever you feel like a delicious, comforting and easy to prepare meal. And if you get the sniffles, you know what to do.