"How Simple Is That?": At Home With Ina Garten

I have been inside the barn, the barn, and I can tell you this: Inside, it was beautiful. I didn’t grow up with religious institutions, really, but there was something about the space that was, assuredly, holy. When I first entered it, I leaned back, mouth agape, and took in the ceilings, which were painted white and bisected by big, beautiful, old-looking beams, and there were little windows up near the top through which daylight streamed. The day was also beautiful. Eighties. Low humidity. The traffic going into East Hampton on this late August weekday morning was trucks, mostly pickup trucks, with saplings in their beds, and mowers.

The floor inside the kitchen side of the barn was blonde wood and also beautiful. I’d heard about them before, these floors. People who entered the barn were to be aware of the floors and very careful upon them. Crews, especially photo crews or video crews — and there are lots of crews that go in and out of the barn, given that they film the show there, and photograph the books — are instructed that if any equipment touches the floor, it should be placed upon blankets. Again, this morning, we were reminded of the blankets. They were beautiful too — white and cozy. I imagine to fall into them would be like leaping atop a Great Pyrenees.

She entered. Her shirt today was blue. Her hair had been blow-dried — she later told me it’s one of her luxuries, getting her hair blow-dried whenever she can. Her face had been done. She approached us, and to me it felt awkward and this made sense: I assume it must always be awkward, uncomfortable, bothersome even, having people in your beautiful barn, setting up their equipment on your beautiful blonde floor. Which isn’t to say she wasn’t gracious; she absolutely was. She approached me and the photo crew and shook each of our hands. She smiled. She was, obviously, nice.

She began to talk about the barn, which has been around for nine or so years now. Before that, they shot the show in her actual house. We could see it through the French windows across a green lawn, the iconic shingle-style farmhouse. She described how they’d film the show for six weeks at a time, two times a year, and during that period she and Jeffrey would be stuffed upstairs. She said if they’d gone on doing it that way, her husband was going to divorce her. She laughed and everyone else laughed and she clarified the divorce thing was joke. Everybody nodded. Of course the idea of divorcing Jeffrey was a joke.

She talked about how she bought the land where the barn was built after eyeing it for years. When they finally bought it, she said, “Jeffrey said he thought I was going to build a little cottage. One day an enormous hole appeared!” She laughed and we laughed. She leaned back to admire the ceiling and so we all did too, looking again at the whiteness, the beams, the light.

But she had already pivoted, away, to the kitchen, assessing everything that her assistant had set out on the countertop — a magnificent countertop. There was a deep, wide sink in the center and two large cutting boards on each side of it. There were containers of wooden spoons and spatulas. Kale that her assistant had begun to prep. A bowl of eggs, a bowl of garlic, another of long shallots. Everything was tidy, and accessible, and abundant.

The object she had picked up first, though, was perhaps the least fancy-seeming thing in the space: It was the carafe from the white, well-worn coffeemaker. She flipped on the tap and filled it with water. It didn’t really seem to matter that this was the task she was doing. Object in hand, in her kitchen, she seemed to relax.

The coffeemaker was soon hissing, and a pitcher of milk had appeared by its side. Ina eyed and grabbed a silver tray from a shelf and set several white mugs on it. On the previously emailed schedule for the day was a 10:30 meeting, during which it was noted there would be coffee and scones. The scones had already been set out, and Ina Garten herself, it seemed, was the one making the coffee. That morning, I recall I felt pleasure that she made her own coffee. That she was a person just like you or me.

Christopher Testani for BuzzFeed News

Ina Garten likes to say that what she likes about her life is that every day she wakes up and she gets to recipe-test with her assistants, whom she adores. There are two: The first, named Barbara, is closer to Ina’s own age (Ina is 68), and was out of town that day; the second, Lidey, is 25.

Lidey stood a head and a half taller than Ina. She was lanky and thin and blonde and immensely likable. She seemed green but very competent. Lidey, who’d been with Ina for three years, was not a professional chef; that wouldn’t be the point. Part of why Lidey was brought on, in fact, was because Barbara had worked with Ina for so many years, she’d gotten too good at cooking her recipes.

Today they were testing a Waldorf salad, one that will likely appear in Ina's 2018 book (not to be confused with her latest, Cooking for Jeffrey, which published in late October). This was, Ina and Lidey guessed aloud to each other, the fifth or sixth time they’d tested this Waldorf salad. Each woman set herself behind one of the great cutting boards and began prepping various ingredients, referencing a printout of the recipe.

Lidey was working with the frisée, and Ina, looking up, realized Lidey didn’t know how to properly prep it. She joined Lidey at her station. Taking the vegetable from her, Ina explained that the white core is hidden, that you have to turn the plant inside out before you cut out the root. She flipped it, like a ballerina removing a tutu over her head, and then, with a paring knife, de-stemmed it. “I know how to use frisée because I’ve done it before,” Ina said, “but Lidey hasn’t used it, so now I know what questions she has about frisée.”

She took a Sharpie and made a note on the recipe page. Other notes were added as they worked: Ina, for example, would have never thought to tell the people at home to grate the apple only right before you’re going to serve the salad. Lidey set down the apple she’d begun grating, asked why, and Ina replied that it would brown. I knew this already. Perhaps Ina herself had taught me that fact; like a lot of people, I’ve spent untold hours of my life watching Ina Garten on television. But I held my tongue.

The CD player had gotten to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” and Ina beckoned someone to turn up the music, saying, “I need tunes to cook.” Lidey toasted Marcona almonds and arranged bacon on a rack on a sheet pan. Ina weighed and then seasoned two chicken breasts and put them on another sheet pan. She spoke about how she had streamlined this recipe, so all three trays could go in the oven at the same temperature. Ina Garten’s recipes are never needlessly fussy. She doesn’t use techniques or ingredients she feels will alienate home cooks (as she likes to say, “It’s not some octopus eyeballs with seafoam”). She focuses on simple, quality ingredients, and strives to make everything as flavorful as possible. Her own recipe books, the dog-eared row of them, were in her kitchen. I later remarked to her how lovely that was to see, that she cooked from her own books, and she answered that of course she does. “But remember, I’ve written a thousand recipes," she said. "Maybe 850 recipes. I can’t possibly know how much thyme goes into each one. I follow the recipe every single time I make a recipe. I don’t just throw things in.” Ina Garten uses her recipes for the same reason a lot of us do: They work.

Before she departed the room, Ina pointed to three white timers, indicating to Lidey: chicken, bacon, nuts. “How bad could this be?” she asked, and I felt my pulse quicken at hearing an actual quintessential Ina Garten rhetorical question in the flesh. Ina then walked away, telling Lidey she’d like her to make the eggs by herself, to make sure the instructions make sense.

Lidey had been a senior at Bowdoin in 2013 when she’d dreamed up this idea of working for Ina Garten. A good friend’s father is Ina’s attorney. We talked about the Hamptons, about what it’s like living there as a young person — she has a cottage nearby — especially during the 10 months of the year when there aren’t tourists in town. She got a Welsh terrier she named Winkie, which helps, she said. She took up bridge. We talked about the biggest things she’d learned since coming to work for Ina, like having an oven thermometer, like paying attention to timers. Panic flashed through her blue eyes as she said this, and she shot a quick look at the white row of them.

From left: Jeffrey and Ina Garten on their wedding day; Ina Garten in her store, Barefoot Contessa; and Jeffrey and Ina from her newest cookbook, Cooking for Jeffrey

Random House

The other main room in the barn resembled a living room. The floor was stone and there was a great hearth. Again, white fluffy rugs were about. On each wall was an enormous library of books, almost entirely cookbooks. They were orderly, but they also seemed handled often. Post-its poked out of their pages.

In the middle of the room were two puffy orange sofas facing each other, with a puffy orange ottoman between them. Ina figured out which sofa I should sit on and chose a wooden chair for herself. It looked antique, delicate and unusual — its back tall and tapered. When I asked where it was from, she said she believed Belgium. She remarked about how comfortable it was and implored me to sit on it. She rose and I got up and sat on it. “Isn’t it comfortable?” she said, and I had to agree: For an upright old wooden chair it was astonishingly comfortable. We returned to our places and she put her feet up on the ottoman. She wore little slippers.

The first thing we talked about was how loyal her employees tend to be — how her other assistant Barbara worked for her for years, and how a bunch of Barbara’s family worked for her too, back when she had the store. (I later asked to interview Barbara and was declined.) “You’re loyal to people,” I said. She replied, “Good people. Good people. If you’re not really good, you’re off the bus.”

And then we talked about Cooking for Jeffrey. It is her 10th cookbook, and, unlike her previous ones, it incorporates many photos of the two of them, and single-page essays about phases in their marriage, steps in a myth many fans have memorized: Ina met Jeffrey when she was very young, just 16. She was visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, walking across campus. He saw her, figured out who she was, and got in touch. During their courtship she mailed him brownies. They married when she was 20. There’s a photo of them on their wedding day at the beginning of the book; they’re cherubic. They lived in North Carolina. He was in the Army and served in the Vietnam War. It was during a camping trip one summer in Europe — especially in France — when Ina really began to fall in love with food, with cooking from quality ingredients. Back home, she bought Julia Child’s book and started cooking through it.

They lived in DC. He worked in the White House; so did she, for four years, drafting policy papers on nuclear energy out of the Office of Management and Budget. It was a job she described as exciting the first year, and less so the second when she realized she was working on all the same papers again, and even less so the third. She was nearly 30 and she realized she wanted something else. That’s when she saw the listing in the New York Times for the Barefoot Contessa food store for sale in Westhampton Beach — a place she’d never been — and they drove out and saw the 400-square-foot space. For fun, as she tells it, they put in a low offer (she’d been renovating and selling houses some in DC), and to their surprise, the owner called the next day and said it was hers. (“O.M.G.,” she wrote in Cooking for Jeffrey, “I just bought a business!”)

She ran it for 20 years — eventually moving to a larger East Hampton location. In 1999, she sold it to the chef and the manager, and kept an office above the store as she figured out what to do next. She considered the stock market. She considered real estate. While she passed the time, she wrote a cookbook — something Jeffrey suggested she do — called The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. It was a best-seller, and it was followed by another nine best-sellers. (Cooking for Jeffrey is currently topping the New York Times list.) There are 11 million copies of her books in print, and then of course there’s the Barefoot Contessa television show, which has aired on Food Network since 2002. She has over a million followers on Facebook and is approaching that on Instagram. When we talked through her biography, I asked Ina if, when she wrote that first book, she ever imagined she’d become a celebrity.

“Well, I don’t know that I am,” she said.

“You definitely are,” I said.

“I never imagined that I’d be writing 10 cookbooks, for sure.”

Ina Garten and her husband, Jeffrey.

Random House