ANNOUNCER:
00:00:48
The story will continue in a moment. [TICKING] This is just a great weeknight meal. It's so easy to do. You do the first stage. Have yourself a glass of wine. Do the second stage, and dinner's ready.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:01:03
Whether she's whipping up one of her signature chicken dishes, slinging cosmos for her real life friends, or scooping ice cream, Ina Garten is a calming presence in the kitchen, taking the mystery out of cooking. Now, how easy is that?
ANNOUNCER:
00:01:18
She's built a culinary empire by making it all look effortless. I know people don't believe this, but I'm really a nervous cook. And I'm sure every recipe is going to turn out wrong, so I'm incredibly precise. Even now? Even now, I'm there with a cookbook going is it a 1/2 a teaspoon or a whole teaspoon? Are you really? I have to follow my own recipes exactly, because I've spent so much time getting the balance of flavors and textures and everything right. I'm really not a confident cook. I would think that you were like, swigging wine and--
INA GARTEN:
00:01:49
Yeah. --tossing an herb. Let's keep that image going. How's that? So this is my commute to work. Oh, awful for you. I know.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:01:58
At 77, the image of Ina Garten with her denim shirt, chic scarves, and signature bob is as reliable as the tried and true recipes she's built her reputation on. Those recipes are a roadmap for home cooks from a home cook. People like Bobby Flay have worked in restaurant kitchens all his life, and he can just throw things together. I've watched him. He's such a brilliant cook. I'm not that person. I didn't have that experience. When you say you're testing and testing yourself at first, and how many times do you have to make something before you get it right? I mean, sometimes 10 times, sometimes 25 times. Really? And then, I'll print out a page and give it to one of my assistants and watch them make it. And it's so surprises me what people do. I was making lentil salad, warm French lentils, and she was putting in garlic in it. I said, what are you doing? And she said, well, it said cloves-- cloves of garlic in it. And I was like, no, it's cloves, not cloves of garlic. And I thought I never would have made that mistake, but somebody else at home is going to make that mistake. So I just want you to feel like I'm right there beside you, just kind of guiding you through the recipe. So this is the Secret Garden. Don't tell anybody about it.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:03:13
Garten has been guiding viewers from her home in East Hampton, New York, for 20 years. I love these tomatoes. Do you really do the gardening? Well, I point, So, yes? Yes.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:03:27
It may seem like she grew out of the rich Long Island soil. She did not. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ina Rosenberg grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. Her dad was a doctor, her mom a dietician. As a teenager, she was instructed to stay out of the kitchen and excel in school. She did both. She met her future husband, Jeffrey Garten, while she was 16 years old. And four years later, they were married. Jeffrey, a Lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne, later took her backpacking through France. She came home with an ambitious mission. So I got Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking,and I just worked my way through those books, which were very complicated recipes. I mean, they were ingredients in each recipe that was another recipe in itself.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:04:13
Right. And I loved that challenge. You never went to cooking school? Never went to cooking school. Was Julia Child's book your cooking school? Julia Child was my cooking school. Yeah, exactly.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:04:24
Her actual degree was in economics. At 26, she had a job at the White House, analyzing nuclear energy policy for the Ford administration. Jeffrey worked around the corner at the State Department. Each weekend, Ina says they devote their time to less bureaucratic pursuits, like making a great dinner party look simple. To this day, I follow this. I never made something for a dinner party I hadn't made several times. So on Monday, I would make the roast leg of lamb with tomatoes with duxelle, which are finely minced mushrooms for Jeffrey for dinner. Lucky man. And then I'd make it again on Wednesday. And then by Saturday, I knew how to make it. And the poor guy would go, oh, this is delicious. What is this?
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:05:08
After 1,000 dinner parties and two administrations at 30 years old, Ina had burned out of life inside the Beltway. In 1978, she saw this ad in the back of The New YorkTimes for a 400 square foot specialty food store in West Hampton, New York, called The Barefoot Contessa. But you had never been to the Hamptons. I'd never been. And you didn't know anything about running a store. I knew how to make 12 brownies for my friends, but I certainly didn't know how to make 100 brownies. I didn't even know how to cash out the register or slice smoked salmon or-- I mean, to me, brie was like a foreign language. So was it confidence that allowed you to do that, or was it that you were being naive. I have a very low threshold of boredom. And I was really bored with my job. And I just thought, this is really exciting. This is what I do for fun, and now I can do it professionally. And so I just thought, I'm just going to jump in, thinking, well, how hard could this be? Oh, my God.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:06:07
It was really hard. The Gartens say they double mortgaged their house. Ina told us she was working 20 hours a day to keep up with the crowds who came to gawk at the goods and load up on lobster salad. Soon, she opened a bigger shop in East Hampton. It's very deliberate. I was always doing research. It looked like I was just having a good time wandering around, having a party, but it was all careful and deliberate.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:06:33
A calculating businesswoman, Ina Garten, elevated the food scene and soon had finicky Hamptons clientele falling over themselves to have The Barefoot Contessa cater their weddings or Thanksgiving. And every year, we would pack up the orders Wednesday night so people could come in Thursday morning. And I would use the van out next to the store as a refrigerator. And one year, it was like 33 degrees when I was going home. And I thought, nobody wants a frozen Thanksgiving dinner. So I drove the van home. And I set my alarm for every single hour all night to turn the heat on for a few minutes and then go back to sleep. To keep the turkeys warm? To keep the turkeys-- well, the turkeys we roasted in the morning, but the vegetables and the sides and all that stuff.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:07:20
After 18 years, Garten decided to sell The Barefoot Contessa in 1996. So, I mean, one minute I'm making 1,000 baguettes, and the next minute, I have nothing-- I mean, nothing to do. How was that? It was horrible. And I thought, you know, I'm 50. Maybe that's the end of my career.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:07:36
Hardly. The lull lasted nine months before Garten started writing The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,the first of 13 cookbooks, 10 of which have become New York Timesbestsellers, crushing big name chefs by remembering the lessons learned at her specialty food shop. I realized later what I knew was what people wanted to eat at home, which was roast chicken and roast carrots and chocolate cake and coconut cupcakes and things that I knew from the store people bought and took home. You weren't trying to say, here's everything I know. You were saying, here's what you need to know. Yeah. Here's what will make you happy at home. Her latest cookbook, Go-To Dinners, was inspired by the pandemic. And again, Ina is in every detail. One of the things about the book that is not by accident is that you can put it on the counter, and it doesn't flop shut. I'm so glad you noticed that.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:08:29
Early on, Garten sought out a printer in Japan so her cookbooks would lie flat and wouldn't close while cooking. She designed them to have white space for notes and pictures as guides. Simplicity is a non-negotiable. Do you ever throw something out because it's too difficult to make? Absolutely. If I get to a point in a recipe and I go, I'm never going to make this recipe again, everything goes in the trash. And if you're exhausted by the time you finish that, it's not good for the party. So you're thinking about the party above all things? I'm always thinking about the party.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:09:00
The party got real big, real fast after Ina was invited to be on Martha Stewart's show. An outtake caught the eye of a Food Network executive. She said that I was making something, and I took a spoonful of it and tasted it and go, this is really good. And the Martha Stewart crew said, cut! You can't talk with your mouth full. And I was like, why? It's a cooking show.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:09:23
Garten told network executives she didn't want a show, but eventually gave in with a caveat. Instead of an adoring studio audience, she insisted on a more intimate affair in her kitchen. She directed the cameras to come closer, so it felt like a dinner party. One of the things I'm fascinated by is that there are a lot of people who watch your show who don't cook.
INA GARTEN:
00:09:45
Don't cook. What do you think the appeal is? Why are they watching you cook. I think there was a time when mom was in the kitchen cooking for us, and I think people feel like they're just hanging out with me, and I'm cooking for them. When you're cooking, it's not about look at me. Oh, it's never about look at me. I'm like, don't look at me. I'm just the opposite. It's funny, I have a friend who said, everybody else is like, look at me, look at me. Pay attention to me. And I'm like, well, this is what I do. You can do whatever the [BLEEP] you want to do. And I'm just having fun here.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:10:24
The fun came to a screeching halt for Ina and everyone else during the pandemic. Unable to film her show or cook for her friends, Garten turned to Instagram, offering practical advice to home cooks. It's really important to keep traditions alive.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:10:40
And stirring up some fun. You never know who's gonna stop by. Wait a minute. Nobody's stopping by.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:10:45
2 cups of vodka and more than three million views later-- Delicious.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:10:51
With the lockdown over, we wanted to make sure Ina didn't have to drink alone. If you do this, Jeffrey arrives. Hi, sweetie. Hi. You know Sharyn, right? I know Sharyn. Hi, Sharyn. So we made a red grapefruit Paloma for you. Wow. Taste that.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:11:07
Mr. Garten had a successful career on Wall Street and served as the Dean of Yale's Business School. But millions of viewers know him simply as Jeffrey. Ina has called you her muse before. What is she to you? Well, she's the center of my life. Oh. She's actually the font of an enormous amount of fun. And she is the center of a home. That's what she is to me. Thank you. That's not bad.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:11:39
The couple's been married for more than 50 years. Is this a typical day at the house? Oh, yeah, we have cocktails all the time. A couple of times a day. And that's the secret to a happy marriage. Exactly right. Just delicious. Thank you.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:11:53
The next morning, we went looking for carbs, but in the Hamptons, the corner shop doesn't sell donuts. This is Carissa's. So cute. Isn't it wonderful?
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:12:03
Garten took us to her favorite local bakery for a taste of the good life. What is it that you love about this spot? Well, first, I love Carissa's because it's two local women, and the two of them have built this extraordinary place with great quality food. They use local ingredients on almost everything, and they're here every day. And it just feels like what I used to do. It feels like coming home. Oh, look how fabulous that is. Wow. Oh, me, that is fancy. This is just what I would typically have for breakfast. Exactly. This is all lovely, but the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich is like $20. A lobster roll's 38. But you know, first of all, it's organic. It's local, and things are expensive here. But it's not just a piece of white bread. It's a roll that Carissa made. One of the luxuries of being here is that you can make a really good quality product.
SHARYN ALFONSI:
00:12:52
Garten's life isn't all French pastries and rose-colored cocktails, but we thought it's pretty dang close. She may still be a nervous cook, but Ina Garten has nailed the recipe for a good life. I want to do what I love doing, and I want to do it really well, and then I want to have a life. Julia sold French food. Martha sold perfection. You're slinging fun. Well, I just think if you're not having fun, what's the point, really? [TICKING]
