The story of how Food Network host Ina Garten turned often called the Barefoot Contessa is a humorous one: Garten’s Barefoot Contessa TV present is called after her Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, which in flip had been named after her Barefoot Contessa meals shops.
But Garten, now 74, didn’t give you the title; the primary retailer’s unique proprietor did. “She had been called that when she was a kid, after the movie with Ava Gardner [1954’s The Barefoot Contessa],” Garten informed MSNBC’s Willie Guest in September, per Insider. “The family used to call her the Barefoot Contessa; it was her nickname.”
And, as you’ll see under, Garten initially wished to rename her retailer. With Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa turning 20 — having premiered on November 20, 2002, with the episode “The Mediterranean Feast” — we’re rounding up enjoyable info about Garten’s path to cooking-show fame.
She met husband Jeffrey Garten when she was 15 years outdated
And Ina married him at age 20. Jeffrey, a frequent presence on Barefoot Contessa, later turned a managing director of Lehman Brothers, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade within the Clinton administration, and a professor and dean on the Yale School of Management. “Really sweet, kind, funny, smart, supportive, just everything you could ever dream of,” Ina stated of Jeffrey in a 2015 interview with CBS News. “I mean, here we are 50 years later. And I just feel that much more about it!”
She turned a pilot in faculty
“When Jeffrey and I first got married, we lived in North Carolina — I was still in college — and across the street was a small airport, and so I went across the street and I found the people who were training pilots, and I said, ‘I’d like to learn how to fly a plane,’” Garten recounted on The Drew Barrymore Show earlier this month. “And they said to me, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have anybody here that would teach a woman how to fly an airplane.’ [I said] ‘Well, then find somebody.’”
Garten additionally shared that on one memorable event, she didn’t notice she needed to ask permission for a taxiway and she or he almost collided with a helicopter on the tarmac.
Julia Child is one in all Garten’s heroes
Early of their marriage, Garten and her husband spent months in France, the place she turned “enamored” with French meals and acquired each volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “That really was the beginning of my culinary education, my self-education,” she informed Food & Wine earlier this 12 months, hailing Child as one in all her heroes. “I’m sure nobody thought anybody would want to watch somebody making an omelet on TV. And yet, she believed in it. She really believed in it, and she just kept going.”
Garten labored on nuclear coverage within the White House
By 1976, a then 28-year-old Garten was engaged on her MBA at George Washington University and dealing full-time on the White House, serving to to put in writing the president’s finances and nuclear power coverage via her job on the Office of Management and Budget. “I thought it was really interesting, and we were working on huge, $20 billion projects we were either budgeting or not budgeting,” Garten informed Bustle in 2020. “It’s exciting; whatever you’re working on, it’s going to the president. But at some point, I just came to realize that nothing was happening — that I kept on working on the same issue every year. I’d put it in the budget, Congress would take it out for political reasons, then we’d put it back in, and it would get taken out [again].”
She additionally flipped homes
Perhaps in some alternate universe, Garten is an HGTV star as an alternative of a Food Network star: She flipped homes throughout her time in Washington, D.C. “I loved doing it, so I didn’t find it stressful,” she defined to Washingtonian in 2018. “I was working a lot, but it was something I did on my own time, and I was also teaching myself how to cook. I think when you’re young, you do all that stuff.”
Garten purchased the Barefoot Contessa retailer after seeing it on sale within the newspaper
Garten purchased the unique Barefoot Contessa retailer, a 300-square-foot specialty meals store in Westhampton Beach, NY, after seeing it listed on the market within the newspaper. “My grandfather owned a candy store,” she informed The Cut in 2020. “And one generation later, my father was a great surgeon. He saw his daughter going to work in the White House, and then all of a sudden, she’s going to own a grocery store. He was like, Wait a minute, we’re going in the wrong direction here.”
The future TV star was bought on the property… however perhaps not the signal out entrance. “I actually thought it was a terrible name. Who calls a food store Barefoot Contessa?” she informed Geist.
Soon, nevertheless, Garten got here round to the title that will turn into synonymous together with her TV present and her cooking persona. “I actually liked the name because it’s about being elegant and earthy,” she stated. “It would’ve been a terrible thing to change it.”