The Barefoot Contessa is back — and our kitchens are better for it
Ina Garten returns with professional tips for better home cooking
Does the mere thought of Ina Garten uttering, “How easy is that?” “Store-bought is fine” or “How bad can that be?” bring a wistful smile to your lips? Is the colour of her Le Creuset Dutch oven burned into your memory (classically neutral Dune)? Can you rattle off her favourite cocktail (a whiskey sour, naturally) or name the secret ingredient in her “outrageous” brownies (… it’s coffee) without missing a beat?
Garten wields a strange superpower. She is intensely beloved – her luxurious East Hampton/Paris/Manhattan lifestyle somehow neither intimidating nor exclusionary – and heavily memed (search for any of the aforementioned Ina-isms online). Jeffrey, her husband of nearly 50 years, has an allure all his own; for scores of fans, their union epitomizes peak #relationshipgoals. Over her decades-long career, Barefoot Contessa devotees have enthusiastically followed her shining culinary example (1.6 million on Instagram alone, almost half of them milennials).
“People stop me all the time and tell me I taught them how to cook and it just knocks me out. I can’t imagine that I’ve been able to do that,” says Garten. “If you cook, people show up and you create a community around yourself. And I think that’s what we need to do in this world… It’s really important to bring people together — and around a table with something absolutely delicious that’s familiar and comforting. I don’t think there’s anything better than that.”
The lauded Food Network host and bestselling author has spent 40 years in professional kitchens, and 20 years running the now closed Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in the Hamptons, New York. Over the decades, the selftaught cook has picked up innumerable tips and techniques from chefs that can greatly enhance home cooking. And in her eleventh book, Cook Like a Pro (Clarkson Potter, 2018), she shares some of them, interspersed among her hallmark streamlined, approachable recipes.
From cutting a head of cauliflower from the stem end rather than the top – to save your kitchen floor from being strewn with tiny florets – to shaving Parmesan with a vegetable peeler to produce attractive curls for scattering on a salad, applying “pro tips” has the power to make your food taste better and the act of cooking itself more efficient. Garten describes herself as “a scientist at heart” (she worked as a budget analyst in the White House in the 1970s), and identifies common kitchen pitfalls through observing her assistants and friends while they cook and grocery shop.
“I like that process of starting something and watching it happen. Really, it’s just basic scientific process. The difference is in this case I end up with a nice chocolate cake instead of nuclear power plants,” Garten says with a laugh. “We don’t tend to have a parent or the classic mother or grandmother in the kitchen cooking anymore. We almost have to teach ourselves how to cook, so I want to be there for people that want to know how to cook. It’s hard if you don’t know exactly the right way to do (something). And if you do know the right way to do it, you feel more confident about your cooking. It’s like any hobby, if you’re confident about it you’re going to do it more and you’re going to get better at it.”
Excerpted from Cook Like a Pro: Recipes & Tips for Home Cooks by Ina Garten. Copyright © 2018 by Ina Garten. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.