Many books open with epigraphs. Maybe Plato, the Bible or Oscar Wilde; usually lofty, and generally by a long-dead stranger.
Ina Garten begins her memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” with the following: “Do what you love. If you love it, you’ll be very good at it.”
It’s attributed to her husband, Jeffrey Garten, familiar to fans as a loving, steady presence and a key part of Ina Garten’s brand as a wildly successful cookbook author and TV personality.
The quote from Mr. Garten, a noted economist better known to viewers as an affable and hungry helpmeet, does indeed sum up the themes of his wife’s book — and serves as a good barometer for your enjoyment of it. This is a story about good fortune, work and being obsessed with your husband.
Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.
Instead of beginning chronologically, or even in medias res, Garten opens when her life really started: in 1965, when she is a high school senior and Jeffrey Garten a sophomore at Dartmouth.
We move to 1978, when she spots an ad in the Sunday New York Times. It’s for a catering and food shop in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa, named after an Ava Gardner movie, that promises to “gross over six figures in summer alone.”
She buys it for $20,000 despite working in Washington, D.C., and having no real experience in the food industry. It works out. “You bake cookies, you sell cookies, and if the cookies don’t sell, you make something else that customers will love and that WILL sell,” she writes. “It’s a business problem to solve, and it involved chocolate chip cookies.”
With this back story established, she returns to her beginnings. She was born Ina Rosenberg to a Jewish family and from the age of 5 lived in Stamford, Conn. Her father was a stylish surgeon with a big personality; her mother was slim and anxious. Ina was not encouraged to be close to her brother, Ken. “We were raised as if we were only children, with little interaction between us.” Dinnertime was bland and abstemious: plain broiled chicken or fish, steamed broccoli, canned peas and carrots and questions like, “What did you accomplish today?”
And then there was her father’s volatility and abuse. “He’d hit me or pull me around by my hair. Then, as if shocked by his own behavior, he’d leave the house, or go down to the basement until he could compose himself.” She vowed that if a future partner ever raised his voice or hand to her, she would immediately leave.
When she meets Jeffrey Garten, he tells her he thinks she needs to be taken care of — and volunteers to be that someone. She devotes herself to Jeffrey, which she admits was retrograde even for the era. “College girls were burning their bras and women were trying to get out of the kitchen. And what was I doing? I was demanding that my mother let me into the kitchen to bake brownies to send to my boyfriend!” (Garten keeps this signature conversational tone throughout, including plenty of italics and exclamation points.)
After they marry, she follows him to a military base in North Carolina, but things really come alive for them after he gets out and they take a long road trip, camping all over Europe. She claims they were never bored, sick or had a bad day. Perhaps this was because of the food they discovered: Gariguette strawberries, Cavaillon melons, Poilâne bread, rotisserie chickens.
When she buys Barefoot Contessa (after a few boring jobs in D.C.), she brings some of that abundant Euro grocery energy to her shop, the roast chicken served in picnic-ready checked paper containers. She adds curry to chicken salad and experiments with sun-dried tomatoes and fennel. She throws her devoted staff Olympics-themed parties with bagel tosses and a flaming duck torch. Estée Lauder shows up in white gloves and orders barbecued ribs.
Garten finds a professional purpose but realizes what she lacks is independence. “There was the sense in our marriage that he was the parent, and I was the child,” she writes. “Then, when I went out in the world and started working, the dynamic shifted, and our roles became ‘man’ and ‘wife.’” They separate.
“And just like that, I was alone.”
This is the moment when the Jeffrey hagiography finally ends and a more powerful portrait of a marriage emerges. It would have been easy for Garten to gloss over this part of her life, or to omit it all together. But it’s truly inspiring to read how they gradually come back together. And it’s proof that the perfect relationship they show onscreen was hard-earned.
After that, her challenges seem conquerable. When she feels burned out, she decides, with help from her therapist, that what she needs is to drive a convertible and get massages. (Said therapist later stops practicing and becomes Garten’s “dear friend and trusted adviser” — I would love a documentary on that relationship alone.)
She publishes a first cookbook that becomes a runaway success, and in short order becomes a TV star. By now, we understand that Ina Garten is both a born hustler and an all-around luck magnet who can conjure loans and waterproof tents seemingly at will. When she devotes a large portion of the book to the challenges of finding the perfect Left Bank pied-à-terre, we’re rooting for an easy solution to Garten’s champagne problems.
None of us is Ina Garten. And yet, she has created an inviting and relaxing world that’s the equivalent of one of her cocktail recipes. To use a Barefoot Contessa catchphrase, How great is that?
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