Very few people achieve first name status, i.e., they are so much part of the conversation and universally admired that if someone refers to them only by their first name, everyone knows who they mean. Ina Garten is one of them.
She was once known primarily as the Barefoot Contessa, initially from the store where she had her start in East Hampton, her first cookbook title, and then from the television show on the Food Network, its longest-running series. The store is now long gone, and while the show is still hugely popular, she has transcended its title. Ina is now bigger than the moniker, and even has a successful show with her own name, "Be My Guest With Ina Garten," now in its second season (with an East Hampton Village street named after her -- more details in an upcoming issue).
Her new book "Go-To Dinners" dropped on Oct. 25 and fans are savoring their fill of interviews and articles spun out of a full-court media press. Somewhat more locally, she spoke on Oct. 26 to Frank Bruni for a virtual conversation sponsored by East Hampton's BookHampton and RJ Julia (in Connecticut).
Messages in the chat revealed people checking in from all over, a national (and international) coming together in a way that transcended any political divides made prominent by the upcoming election. Ms. Garten's relaxed and calming presence reminded viewers that we're all doing the best we can, store-bought is okay, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are completely acceptable for dinner.
Her interlocutor, Frank Bruni, has his own following from a multi-faceted career that took him from war correspondent and chief movie critic at The Detroit Free Press to what seems like every role at The New York Times, including chief restaurant critic. He is now an opinion writer at that paper, weighing in once a week on those more divisive political issues of our day.
But on Oct. 28, Frank was as relaxed as Ina, ready to dig into the important issues of her day: Where does she get her recipe ideas? How long do they take to perfect? What makes a great dinner party? You can imagine the rest. But you don't have to, because a selected summary follows.
With Ms. Garten now on her 13th cookbook, Mr. Bruni asked if she ever worried about running out of recipe ideas. Ms. Garten recalled the surprising success of her first cookbook and the immediate request for another from her publisher. "And I said, 'Whoa, whoa, that's all the recipes I have.' I'd spent 20 years in a specialty food store developing those recipes, and that was it."
It was her first challenge and she answered it by drawing on her catering recipes, which became "The Barefoot Contessa Parties." By the third one she said she thought, "Now I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel . . . I don't know if I can put this together." But she did, "slowly building back a body of recipes that I could use" for what became her "Family Style" book.
After those first few books, "I could sit down and make a list of 75 recipes that I wanted to test for the next book." She related it to exercise, "the more you do it, the better you get at it." Now, she can pull recipes from her imagination. "I start with a list and I just keep working on it," adding things that occur to her and subtracting those she decides are less interesting.
Ideas come from everywhere, from the roast vegetables with jammy eggs she had at Danny Meyer's Maiolino restaurant in Manhattan to Al Roker's wife using apple cider donuts to make a bread pudding. She said she thinks about the flavors and textures and then goes home and makes something. She then works to perfect it, no less than five or six and sometimes 25 times.
"I'll have a flavor and a texture in my head and I'll just start cooking. And then at some point, it'll just ping in my head — okay, that's it. That's what I've been looking for." Then, she said, she really starts testing it, with different or similar ingredients. When she made a white bean soup during the pandemic with dried beans, she found that the Instagram users who tried the recipe mostly used canned beans. "They made the exact same recipe with a completely different ingredient. And so it's really important for me to know not just what I've done, but how people are going to use the recipe."
Once she's finished. she gives her recipes to an assistant who is not as proficient in the kitchen as she is and one who is a better cook to see what they do with them. "Every single time I learned something that's just so shocking to me that it would never occur to me to do."
Mr. Bruni asked how the pandemic changed how she views dinner. While offering suggestions on Instagram for what to do with the staples her followers had bought for the shutdown, she was also working on the new cookbook and making three meals a day for herself and Jeffrey Garten, her husband who also is simply "Jeffrey" to fans. She did it without thinking for a couple of months, eventually realizing she needed a change. "I can't make meat, vegetables, and a starch for dinner every night."
She discovered other approaches: one-pot meals, breakfast for dinner ("because who wants to cook at 8 o'clock in the morning?"), or an "English ploughman's lunch" (cheese and ham and celery sticks and chutney and bread). She said the new options "released me from having to do the traditional dinner, and I kind of don't even want to go back. . . . It's just really fun to order out a pizza and make a really good Caesar salad and invite some people over and have a good time."
Good guests are essential to a good party in Ina-land. "I expect if you're going to be a guest, you're going to show up and have a good time and, and engage with people . . . that makes a really nice party."
For that, she will reward them with a dinner everyone can eat. "I only invite people I really love and I want them to have a really good meal." She asks everyone ahead of time for their dietary restrictions and doesn't design the menu until then. "And I always figure out something that everybody can eat." She serves buffet style so guests can choose what and how much to put on their plate. And "if it takes a little maneuvering to try and figure out a pasta dish or vegetarian dish that everybody can eat, I'm happy to do that."
"Simple" is a very operative word her world. "A lot of what I do is take a recipe that's complicated, like a Julia Child recipe, and figure out how to make it simpler and how you can get the same flavor and texture without as much work." Her tools of choice are sharp knives, pots and pans, and sheet pans, all the highest quality.
Even the books are pared down. When her first book came out, many cookbooks had 250 recipes. "Who can make 250 recipes? Even if you made five of them, you feel like they are 245 that you haven't made, and you somehow feel disappointed."
From the start, she wanted her books to be 75 or 80 recipes that anyone could make, "but really good recipes so that you open the book and you look at the photograph and say that looks delicious. And then you look at the title and you understand that it's chocolate or orange mousse and you know what that tastes like."
She doesn't choose exotic things like a lemongrass cake, whose taste most people wouldn't know or whose ingredients are not easily found in a grocery store. She has become better at writing them, "but I still stick to 75 recipes . . . and I want each one to be really, really good." The extra time she spends testing them is worth it when someone says "they've made a recipe of mine for a dinner party that they've never made before and it came up perfectly. That's how I know I've nailed it."
