Chatting with the Barefoot Contessa on a bench on Newtown Lane
It sometimes seems to me as if the world is sending us its gifts—that so much wealth and talent and beauty and accomplishment flow from all over the world to the Hamptons. So it is nice now and then to see the gifts flow in the other direction, for us to send our local talent far across the Shinnecock Canal.
That’s just what’s happened recently with Ina Garten. Ina is the owner of Barefoot Contessa, the extraordinary food store in East Hampton that makes you want to forget about all the things you are supposed to be doing that day and instead hang out on Newtown Lane and think about brownies. We’ve all experienced the wonderful food prepared in the store—at home, at parties, on the beach or even on the street. Now Ina is giving away the secrets of why our behavior changes when her food is near. Well, not giving them away. Actually, she’s selling them in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, and it is selling very well indeed all across the country.
I called Ina recently and asked her to meet me with a large cappuccino and a coconut cupcake at a designated bench on Newtown Lane. She arrived looking relaxed and happy, as if traveling to the West Coast on book tours were her favorite activity. It turned out that after ten months of cooking and experimenting with recipes for the book, getting out and talking about it did make her happy. Seeing that it was not just Barefoot Contessa customers responding, as she had initially expected, but people from all over, made her even happier.
Martha Stewart Living and House Beautiful have recently published features on Ina, and the book has been among the best selling cookbooks on Amazon.com. Martha also wrote the forward for the book. I imagine all that made Ina happy too.
Since journalism is a recent career for me, my first question to Ina was about how she liked writing. She told me she had never written before—except for things like the President’s budget for nuclear energy programs when she worked in the White House Office of Management and Budget in 1978. But she liked the writing as well as the cooking. As a creative technique she pretended she was talking to a certain friend, and the result, it seems to me, is a book of engaging, effortless prose. It truly sounds like Ina talking.
Since my journalism interests are exclusively local, my next question to Ina was about how East Hampton was involved in the creation of the book. The bottom line was that it could not have happened anyplace else. The eighty-five recipes in the book are all favorites from the store and all are easy to prepare at home—things like fresh corn salad, turkey meat loaf, roasted vegetables and pecan squares. Wherever possible, the dishes are based on local, fresh ingredients. And the entire creative process—cooking, writing, designing, photography—took place at Ina’s home on Buell Lane or hometown places such as Jim Pike’s Sagaponack farm stand or Sal Iacono’s chicken farm. Her associates on the book, her photographer, food stylist, prop stylist, worked it all out in her kitchen as well the dining room, the porch and the garden. The book, when you examine it closely, is a marvelous reflection of how we live in the Hamptons.
The book jacket talks about “secrets from the East Hampton specialty food store” so I asked her to tell me the biggest secret, or whisper it just in case anyone strolling by on Newtown Lane was listening. “It’s simple” she told me, and went on to explain how simplicity is her secret ingredient. It’s a theme of her cooking in the store and at home, of her entertaining and of her presentation. She started years ago with complex French food and then began to let go. She wanted easy food, based on what’s here and what’s good; she wanted easy, relaxing parties; she wanted to take remembered flavors and improve the memories. “Food is not about impressing people. It’s about making them feel comfortable.” And the book does tell us how to cook simply, entertain well and make our friends comfortable.
We all know it is very hard to present things simply. Ina’s editor told her that most cookbook authors begin with the idea of keeping things simple, but almost no one achieves that. Ina is one of the exceptional authors who did succeed, both in the content and the form of the book. That is a big accomplishment, but for those of us who have been eating Barefoot Contessa food for the last twenty years or so, it is no surprise. Sitting and chatting with Ina on a bench on Newtown Lane on a beautiful June day made me think of all the wonderful food and interesting people and great parties we have here in the Hamptons. It made me glad to be in this best of all possible places. It also made me realize it was almost time for lunch. Perhaps, I thought, I’d just return to the bench from the store with some grilled lemon chicken salad…or should it be sugar snap peas with sesame?