It may surprise you to learn that Ina Garten, the merry purveyor of famously comforting delicacies such as “outrageous” chocolate brownies (a dash of instant coffee and less flour is the key), the “perfect” roast chicken (pay attention to those sautéed onions), and sugary muffins flecked with coconut frosting (don’t skimp on that almond extract), suffered through a chilly, decidedly uncomforting childhood.
Her father, Dr. Charles Rosenberg, was an imperious man whose own father ran a junkyard on the Lower East Side. Rosenberg would periodically beat his daughter and pull her around the house by her hair before withdrawing in fits of guilty silence to the basement of their suburban home, in Stamford, Connecticut. Her cheapskate, penny-pinching mother was a practicing nutritionist who banned butter, mayonnaise, and many other delicious things from the Rosenberg household, and she used to send Ina and her long-suffering brother off to school with boxes of sardine sandwiches for sustenance, along with helpings of dry tuna and a few raw carrots.
