I haven't had that many twenty-year cycles yet, so stay tuned." Does she work in twenty-year cycles? I asked. As a matter of fact, she sold the store in 1996, twenty years ago now. And so the store was that, and then after twenty years, it was time to do something else," she said. "I like a nice project that I can chew on. Exactly ten years later, she got the shop. Born in 1948, she married Jeffrey in 1968. Ina’s life seems to move in long smooth cycles of one or two decades. That’s twenty brutal customer service years of making coconut cupcakes and roast chickens for fussy Hamptonites. It is, in fact, an extremely long stretch of time from Ina’s purchase of the Barefoot Contessa store in 1978 to the largely self-funded production of her first cookbook in 1999. Her story in this manner is miserably compressed. She used to do all the gardening herself, but no longer does. She built a working barn in which to cook and sometimes film. Suddenly there was a new house in East Hampton. The Food Network eventually came courting, and she said no and said no and then said yes. The store was wildly successful on New Year's Day of 1985, she went to see a new 3000-square-foot space in East Hampton. She offered, she purchased, and then she learned how to do everyone's job. It was 400 square feet and it was called Barefoot Contessa and it sold potato salad and things. She found in the New York Times, in March of 1978, an ad for a store for sale in West Hampton Beach, a place she had never been. She became love-drunk with hauling bags home from the farmer's market and came back to America and learned to cook from Julia Child. They went to France for four months and lived on five dollars a day, and one day there she saw a French family eating at a long table outdoors and became possessed of this vision of glamour and taste. "There isn't a letter, there isn't a recipe, there's no photograph, there isn't a font, there isn't a color, there isn't a detail that I don't totally do myself," Ina said, so that's how it's done. There is something that Ina Garten knows about what we want, or who we want to be, or how we want to feel. In 2013, when she didn't even have a new book out, her 2012 book still made it into the year’s top five. "It's ever so slightly less than the other books." She topped the best-selling cookbooks of 2014 list and the best-selling cookbooks of 2012 list. In terms of sales, "I mean it's - as my publisher says - it's not an abysmal failure," Ina said. Published in 2001, it has a print run of a mere 800,000 copies, a bit shy of the population of San Francisco. Her best cookbook, in my opinion, and it is her favorite as well, was her second it is called Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun. "Nine for nine, each book has sold more than the last book," Ina said. Her most recent, 2014's Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, which is basically about how to not have to spend precious moments cooking during a romantic New Year's Eve in Paris, had a print run of 1.4 million. "My business is cookbooks, and TV is really good for supporting that," Ina told me to date, she has 10,600,000 of them in print. The show, Barefoot Contessa, takes up small bits of her life, maybe six weeks a year total in two chunks. "There isn't a letter, there isn't a recipe, there's no photograph, there isn't a font, there isn't a color, there isn't a detail that I don't totally do myself"Īnd while many might think of her career as being a person who appears on television, she is rather a cookbook writer, one who happens to appear on the Food Network to service the audience for her cookbooks. She looks flush, in a way that she didn't when she started out marketing ideas of comfort and contentment and wealth. Her hair has reached peak spectacularity, it shines with under-color and moves with glory her manicure is impeccable the skin of her face is hydrated and lush. Her veil is pushed back and she is smiling, her husband Jeffrey is laughing and in uniform, and they are cutting what looks like a quite inedible three-tiered cake.īut even as she has stood all these decades stirring and paring, laughing and cocktailing, her hair, nails, skin - all the exposed human parts - each has become more coddled and elegant and more content. The only time I have seen her forehead is in a black-and-white picture from her wedding day. Throughout her thirty-seven-year career in food, Ina has remained remarkably unchanged in both concept and presentation, with her bangs 'n bob, and her cute, untucked, custom-made button-front shirts that are literally the only tops she wears.
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