Ina Garten on her memoir, and a life of reinvention

Even making a cocktail with Ina Garten takes precision, but boy, is it worth it. “The key to this is that it’s fresh juice,” she said. “So many times you go to a bar or restaurant and they make whiskey sours with, like, bottled lemon juice. That’s just the worst!

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s Fresh Whiskey Sours

The kitchen in her studio in East Hampton, New York, is familiar to millions of viewers of her Emmy Award-winning cooking shows on the Food Network. But she doesn’t like to call herself a chef. “Well, I’m not,” she said. “I’m not a trained chef.”

In fact, as she writes in her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens” (to be published October 1), back in the 1970s she and her husband Jeffrey were both working in economic policy jobs at the White House. But her “after hours therapy,” as she puts it, was hosting dinner parties for friends. “I just thought, this is backwards,” she said. “I love what I do after hours, and what I do during the day wasn’t so exciting to me.”

Just after her 30th birthday, she was reading The New York Times, when she spotted a little ad for a specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa. “And I went home that night and I said to Jeffrey, ‘I need to do something creative.’ And that was the beginning of it.”

They bought the shop for $20,000, taking a second mortgage on their D.C. home. Jeffrey would commute on weekends, while Ina ran the store.

It was especially surprising because, growing up, Ina was not allowed to go off the beaten track in any way. “It’s not just that I wasn’t allowed to go off the beaten track,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to make a decision on my own.”

She was born Ina Rosenberg in 1948, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where her father was a doctor and her mom stayed at home.

It was a very comfortable life, but there was a family secret: Her father was prone to temper tantrums and would physically beat her, even dragging her around by her hair. “I think I wanted to fight back, but I was afraid he would kill me,” Garten said.

Asked if her mother tried to protect her, Garten replied, “Maybe she was just as afraid as I was.”

But her life would change when she was just 16. While visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, another student named Jeffrey Garten spotted Ina through the library window. Asked what he found so attractive about her, Jeffrey replied, “Everything, absolutely everything. The way she was standing, she was laughing.  And she was just beautiful.”

He wrangled an introduction, and they were married in 1968.

While Jeffrey is sometimes a congenial presence on Ina’s shows, he is also a noted economist, whom Ina credits with giving her confidence after her miserable childhood. But not about one key thing: she says she was scared that she wouldn’t be a good parent. “Absolutely, one hundred percent,” she said. “Jeffrey would’ve been a fabulous parent, just fabulous.”

But asked what he thought about their not having children, Jeffrey said, “I didn’t think so much about it. I was very busy just moving on, so it didn’t bother me.”

Ina threw herself into running the Barefoot Contessa with well-heeled Hamptons clients, including a woman who came in every week to buy 10 pounds of grilled lemon chicken. “And finally after weeks and weeks of this, I had to say, ‘What are you doing with ten pounds of grilled lemon chicken?'” Garten recalled. “She said, ‘My cat likes it.'”

But after a while, as Ina reveals for the first time, she began to question the traditional mid-century roles in her marriage, and asked Jeffrey for a separation: “I love to cook dinner, but what I don’t like is for somebody to expect me to cook dinner,” she said. “I think there’s a big difference.”

“So, what I say is, don’t cook dinner,” said Jeffrey.

“And then I cook it!” Ina laughed.   

They clearly worked out their problems. Ina moved her store to East Hampton, but sold it in 1995. She was restless and wanted to try something new. So, she turned her talents to writing cookbooks. Her first, “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” published 25 years ago, was a smash hit. “I somehow connected with home cooks in a way that I couldn’t have imagined,” she said.

Now she’s written 12 more. “I think it’s kind of like exercise,” Garten said. “The more you do it, the better you get at it.”

And with another cookbook on the way, and a popular TV show, “Be My Guest,” Ina Garten says she’s doing what she loves.

And what’s more, before he died, she got an apology from her father: “He said, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ That was it. And I realized he tortured himself as much as he tortured me. And it was over. It was so simple and it was so effective, and it meant everything. And then we went on to have a good relationship.”

      
RECIPE: Ina Garten’s Fresh Whiskey Sours

      
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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Chad Cardin. 

    
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Rita Braver

Rita Braver is a national correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” where she reports on everything from arts and culture to politics and foreign policy.