When Life Gave Ina Garten Lemons, She Made Lemon Bars

Ina Garten has said cooking for husband Jeffrey was a way to "express my feelings" and to connect with him.

Courtesy Ina Garten

Becoming a jack-of-all-trades

Longtime fans of Garten’s will see both new and familiar sides of the celebrated author in the memoir, as she details her years as a young wife and new graduate. She pursued unexpected passions (learning to fly a plane, for one) and made beautiful friendships at jobs that may have felt slightly less beautiful. By the time she landed a plum gig at the White House, in the Office of Management and Budget, she was hosting dinner parties on the weekends and relentlessly testing recipes on the weekdays in between. She flexed her creative muscles outside the kitchen, too, buying and renovating old houses.

“Only in the process of writing the memoir did I come to understand that, in my 20s, I actually had been doing everything that I’d do at Barefoot Contessa — but I did it for fun,” Garten says. “I’d taught myself how to cook. I’d taught myself how to renovate houses. I’d taught myself how to go to the bank and get a loan, things that you need to know when you run a business.”

That doesn’t mean it was an easy or obvious decision to buy Barefoot Contessa, then a single specialty food store in the Hamptons, when Garten answered the ad for it in 1978. On top of the very real financial and career risks she would be taking, her marriage would be put to the test: Long hours, especially on weekends, didn’t exactly cater to the accepted ideas about a woman’s role in a household at that time. And pursuing careers in different cities was virtually unheard of.

“For the memoir, I went back to Washington with my cowriter, Deborah Davis,” Garten notes. The trip opened up old wounds, including those from a brief time that she and Jeffrey separated in their marriage, which happened shortly after she left Washington for the Hamptons. “We went to the last house that we lived in, and she said, ‘Tell me about the conversation that you had with Jeffrey when you were leaving.’ And I lost it,” Garten recalls. “I had forgotten how unhappy I was in Washington, how frustrated I was that I wanted to have my own business.”

Of course, the beloved celebrity couple eventually reconciled, each coming through the rocky period with a greater understanding and appreciation of what the other wanted in day-to-day life. “It was important for me to realize that I took a chance,” Garten says of her decision to leave D.C. for the Hamptons. “I had the courage to do it, and my life would never be what it is if I hadn’t.”

Two months after Ina Garten turned 30, she spotted an ad for a “Catering, Gourmet Foods, and Cheese Shoppe” in the Hamptons. Within a few months, she had purchased the Barefoot Contessa, pictured here in 1978.

Courtesy Ina Garten

Finding her rhythm

The nearly two decades she spent running Barefoot Contessa were a hit, of course. The store grew to a larger space, then a second location. After she sold it in 1996, she would go on to author a dozen-plus bestselling cookbooks. And of course, Garten eventually won fans as an on-screen personality for the Food Network. But she is still always planning her next move — and her next meal.

“I get inspiration from everywhere I go,” she says. “I do read a lot of cookbooks, but a lot of them are very long recipes that require you to have things like 2 teaspoons of demi-glace. And nobody at home has demi-glace — or six people to wash the pots afterward.” Architecture and design, she says, offer an alternative. “For me, design is about simplifying — about making things the essence of what they are,” she says. “And I think that’s true about recipes too.”

A frisée aux lardons (chicory salad with bacon dressing) from Balthazar in New York City, for example, recently inspired her to reevaluate the classic dish for a future cookbook. And lately she’s been opting for scaled-back Sunday lunches over extravagant Saturday night dinners.

“I’m always surprised how much easier it is,” she says breezily. “The meal’s simpler. Everybody has more energy — they’ve done all their chores on Saturday — and I find the guests are more relaxed.”

"Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir" by Ina Garten is intimate, entertaining and inspiring.

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Just as she does in her recipes and on television, Garten makes an art of leaning in to the everyday pace and pleasures of regular life. She does yoga, she has a trainer, she skips junk food — but she also gives herself the grace to relax.

“As I’ve gotten older, I tend to work really hard in the mornings and then do other things in the afternoon. For a couple of hours a day, I have to be what I call ‘toes up’— I might read in bed or take a nap or answer emails,” she says. “Your body tells you when you’re tired. Most of us just power through it, but eventually that takes its toll. I’ve learned to listen.”

In some ways, maybe it’s the art of listening that’s made Garten the household name she is today. Whether she’s tapping into the needs of the average home cook, considering the other party’s motives in a negotiation or drowning out her internal critic, Garten has honed an astute sense of what notes should carry weight and when — and she wields that judgment in service of her recipes, her readers and her community. “I think you have to be very conscious about reminding yourself that your voice is more important than that voice,” she says. And her voice reaches farthest when it’s helping fans around the world share a table with the ones they love.

“Cooking is a gift to the people around you, and you create a community for yourself when you do it,” she says. “The key is that it doesn’t matter what you serve. You can serve something simple that’s delicious with a peach tart from a bakery, and you can have a very good time with your friends. You don’t have to make the peach tart.”