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.
“Dinners were more nutritious than delicious, and no one ever asked what we wanted to eat except maybe on a birthday,” Garten writes early on in her frank, amiably chatty memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, which was composed over several years with the help of the writer Deborah Davis. When young Ina was sick, her mother would banish her to her room and give her a bell to ring if she wanted, say, a bowl of bland chicken soup left outside the door.
Cooking in general, and recipe writing in particular, are exacting, detail-oriented disciplines, so it’s no surprise that young Ina excelled in science classes at school. When she won the citywide science fair two years in a row, her parents didn’t bother to show up for the prize ceremony, or even congratulate her on her achievement. “Discouraged” and “unmotivated” are the adjectives this great cooking entrepreneur uses to describe her unhappy childhood. “This was the endless loop in my head,” she writes. “You’ll never amount to anything.”
“Dinners were more nutritious than delicious, and no one ever asked what we wanted to eat except maybe on a birthday.”
She was wrong. Beginning in 1978, with the opening of a small specialty-food store in Westhampton Beach, New York, Garten’s Barefoot Contessa empire has grown to include a popular Web site purveying an endless stream of recipes, along with favorite cooking and dining products; an Instagram page, where she dispenses a steady stream of good-natured, handy advice to close to five million followers from her comfortable, carefully manicured home base, in East Hampton; and a catalogue of 13 best-selling recipe books, all of which remain in print.
In the tidy, reliable, user-friendly Garten style, these books have been designed over the years for every possible occasion (At Home, Make It Ahead, Family Style, Parties!). They tend to appear like clockwork, every fall, with the author beaming from the cover, to sell like proverbial hotcakes through the holiday entertaining season before winding up, as they did for many years in my household of Ina fans, in colorfully wrapped packages under the Christmas tree.
As all Ina fans know, comfort, reliability, and a general sense of good-natured ease are the keys to the Contessa cookbooks, which stand in stark contrast to the kind of self-serious, long-winded, anthropological tomes which seem to have been designed by their chef and restaurateur authors to be admired from a distance instead of put to work in a shambling, everyday home kitchen. During a time fraught with all sorts of attitude and ideological strife in the food-writing space, Garten—who traces her roots back to 80s entertaining bibles such as The Silver Palate Cookbook and the homespun wisdom of her hero, Julia Child—has managed to sail serenely above the fray. In a recent exhaustive profile in The New Yorker, the fashion designer Daniel Roseberry compared her to Dolly Parton, another down-home cultural icon who’s equally admired by big-city sophisticates and his Bible-thumping relatives back in Texas. “She’s someone that we can all agree on,” he said.
As this memoir makes clear, however, the creation of the Ina brand was never as easy as it looked. Restless and ambitious, Garten shuttled through numerous jobs (the last one being with the Office of Management and Budget at the Carter White House) before gathering enough cash together in to take a flier, with no previous professional-cooking experience, on a random specialty-food store in a distant, slightly shoddy region of a place called the Hamptons. Predictably, her parents tried to talk her out of the crazy idea and even offered to pay for her to go to architectural school instead. “I made an appointment at an architecture school and somehow ended up meeting with the dean,” she merrily reports. “What an ass.”
The early years were filled with the usual tales of trial and error, and devotees of Ina’s sainted husband and companion, Jeffrey, will be surprised to learn that the all-consuming nature of the business resulted in a lengthy separation between the couple, and even thoughts of divorce. As usual in Ina World, however, competence, decency, and common good sense triumphed in the end.
For connoisseurs of the genre, this book probably won’t take its place on the food-memoir shelf next to edgier classics by writers like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton. The writing style is conversational and straightforward almost to a fault, and although Garten spends extended periods of time with the globe-trotting Jeffrey in far-off places such as Tokyo and Hong Kong, there’s no mention of the strange delicacies she encounters there.
Like most juggernaut best-selling authors, Garten knows her audience, and so we hear again about her love affair with French food (“at the boulangeries in Provence, we fell in love with the baguette”), along with a steady stream of conventional tidbits like “small, intimate parties are so much more satisfying than big ones,” and “the summer of 1978 was all about poached salmon.” Of course, there are recipes—for those outrageous brownies, for the famous coconut cupcakes, and for old chestnuts like coq au vin, which I’m willing to bet works almost as well as it did the first time I attempted it in my own shambling home kitchen, many long decades ago.
Adam Platt is a writer and restaurant critic. He is currently the senior restaurant critic at New York magazine, a position he has held since July 2000
