Ina Garten about her memoirs and a life of reinvention

Even making a cocktail with Ina Garten requires precision, but it’s worth it. “The key to this is that it is fresh juice,” she said. “So often you go to a bar or restaurant and they make whiskey sour with, for example, lemon juice from a bottle. That’s just the worst!

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s fresh whiskey sour

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

As she writes in her new memoir “Be Ready When the Luck Happens” (out October 1), she and her husband Jeffrey both worked in economic policy jobs at the White House in the 1970s. But her “out-of-hours therapy,” as she puts it, consisted of organizing dinner parties for friends. “I just thought, this is backwards,” she said. “I like what I do outside of office hours, and what I do during the day wasn’t that exciting to me.”

Just after her thirtieth birthday, she was reading The New York Times when she saw a small advertisement for a specialty store called Barefoot Contessa. “And I went home that night and said to Jeffrey, ‘I have to do something creative.’ And that was the beginning of it.”

They bought the store for $20,000 and took out a second mortgage on their DC home. Jeffrey commuted on weekends while Ina ran the store.

It was especially surprising because Ina was not allowed to step off the beaten path in any way during her childhood. “It’s not just that I wasn’t allowed to go off the beaten path,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to make my own decision.”

Born Ina Rosenberg in 1948, she grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where her father was a doctor and her mother stayed at home.

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

When asked if her mother was trying to protect her, Garten replied, “Maybe she was as scared as I was.”

But her life would change when she was just 16. While visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, another student, Jeffrey Garten, saw Ina through the library window. When asked what he found so attractive about her, Jeffrey replied: ‘Everything, absolutely everything. The way she stood was smiling. And she was just beautiful.”

He arranged an introduction and they married in 1968.

Although Jeffrey is sometimes a sympathetic presence on Ina’s shows, he is also a well-known economist, which Ina credits with giving her confidence after her miserable childhood. But not about one important thing: she says she was afraid she wouldn’t be a good parent. “Absolutely, one hundred percent,” she said. “Jeffrey would have been a fantastic parent, just fantastic.”

But when asked what he thought about them not having children, Jeffrey said, “I didn’t think about it that much. 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 customers, 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 do you do 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 divorce: “I love to cook, but what “I don’t like is someone who expects me to cook dinner,” she said. “I think there’s a big difference.”

‘So what I’m saying is: not cook dinner,” Jeffrey said.

“And then I cook it!” Ina laughed.

They have clearly solved 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 great success. “Somehow I was exposed to home chefs in a way I couldn’t have imagined,” she said.

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

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

And what’s more, before he died, she received an apology from her father: “He said, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ That’s it. And I realized that he was torturing himself just as much as he was torturing me. And it was so simple and so effective, and it meant everything.

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s fresh whiskey sour

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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Chad Cardin.

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