Ina Garten, a.k.a. the Barefoot Contessa, has a loyal, diverse and growing fan base that follows her anywhere — even through quarantine and a Thanksgiving lockdown.
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Ina Garten’s house, on a side street in the stately, manicured village of East Hampton, was just the way you’d want it to be on a sunny morning in October. By which I mean the lawn was a beautiful rumpled green, and the garden was full of cherry tomatoes, and she was wearing a loose button-down shirt and smiling as she brought me coffee in a hotel-style silver carafe. All appeared just as it does on her television show, “Barefoot Contessa,” that has been shot here since 2002. And I was there this fall because of a sneaking suspicion that, although Ms. Garten — Ina to her fans — has become a queen of quarantine cuisine, we don’t exactly cook from the same pantry. For a person who’d been enclosed in a New York City apartment for seven months, with one end of the kitchen table functioning as my office and the other end as dining room, wandering through her “barn” — a lofty kitchen with two dishwashers and 25 feet of limestone counter space; a sunlit reading room full of cookbooks and couches; a spotless, roomy storeroom lined with fully organized staples — was like floating in a soothing dream. The Contessa’s quarantine is not our quarantine. Her kitchen is not our kitchen. But this year, her Thanksgiving is pretty much our Thanksgiving: tiny and improvised, without the guardrails of tradition we usually rely on for a holiday dinner. That could mean her recipe for roasted turkey breast infused with the flavors of Italian porchetta: garlic, fennel seed, sage and rosemary. The lemony mashed potatoes that she reverse-engineered from a restaurant dish that caught her fancy in Paris. In any case, she will be sticking with her perennial no-stuffing policy, making a savory bread pudding instead. “I hope people will give themselves permission to do whatever they want this year,” she said. Ms. Garten,72, has published 12 cookbooks in 18 years, produced 18 seasons of her show on Food Network, and steadily built up a following that puts her among the most popular culinary figures of the last two decades. Her official fan club’s page on Facebook is not a group that just anyone can join. First, supplicants must make it clear that they are part of the Ina personality cult by answering two key questions: What is the name of her husband, and what is the one herb that she cannot bear? If you replied “Jeffrey” and “cilantro” before even reading the questions to the end, congratulations. You, too, are an Ina superfan. As a reporter, I have spent a lot of time over the same years wondering exactly how a wealthy white woman with no unique culinary skill or television shtick built such a diverse and devoted following. At her house, the answer was revealed in the first five minutes. “I find cooking hard,” she said. “I’m not a trained chef. I love cooking, but it is not easy.” It’s a simple truth, but shared by most home cooks. And that’s what she brings to the screen, combining the enthusiasm of a student and the authority of an expert. If what you want from a cooking teacher are ways to get dinner on the table in 30 minutes while also exploring a global pantry, Ms. Garten is not your go-to television chef. If what you want is to cook food the way they do at the upscale bistro where you already spend your disposable income, she is very probably for you.
