David: Ina Garten is not just a household name, she's beloved. With the help of her Food Network program, the Barefoot Contessa, not to mention all those viral videos, Garten has 14 million cookbooks in print. Her success doesn't come from pioneering recipes or being in the foodie avant-garde, it's got more to do with a confiding, authentic warmth that tells you that you too can make coq au vin, or roast tenderloin, or some roast carrots even. Just follow the recipe. You can do it. Her approach to food is classic and above all, accessible.

I've known her for a while, and I must tell you that the person you see on TV is the one you get in person. Funny, unpretentious, a shrewd businesswoman, and a master of every chicken recipe known in the history of chicken. When she goes on book tour, she doesn't come to a bookstore, she sells out the Kennedy Center. She's pretty successful. A couple of years back, Ina Garten published a book called Go-To Dinners, and I asked her to join me on the program. Now, I have to start out by telling you the last time I had a famous cook on the show, I may have told you this, it was Jacques Pepin. On the radio, with my laptop in the kitchen, I made crepes with him and--

Ina Garten: Wow.

David: Exactly. With my wife Esther laughing at me in the corner of the kitchen, so we're not going to cook. We're just going to talk?

Ina: We're not cooking. We'll cook in person. How's that?

David: Exactly. I'd love to do that.

Ina: Nothing worse than having your wife laughing at you. Your very, very smart wife laughing at you.

David: It's an hourly occurrence. Now, you write in the preface of this book, early in the book, you said that when you were growing up, you had dreaded dinner time. Why was it dreaded? Was the food so terrible? Was it your mom that was making dinner?

Ina: My mother was making dinner. My father was a ear surgeon. My mother was very, I think now I might say that she would be diagnosed with Asperger's, didn't have relationships. She had no interest in food. She would get dinner on the table, but there was no joy in it.

David: What was dinner on the table? What was it?

Ina: Broiled chicken, canned peas. What would I say? She was a dietitian by training and didn't believe in carbohydrates. We never had bread, or potatoes, or polenta or anything absolutely delicious. We didn't even have frozen vegetables. We had canned vegetables. I particularly remember Harvard beets, one of my least favorite things in the world. No child likes Harvard Beach. You might develop a taste for it afterwards, but not when you're 10.

David: It sounds like dinner was not a joyful time.

Ina: It wasn't a joyful time and my parents, particularly my father was very stern taskmaster and would grill us about whatever was in school. He would criticize us. When dinner was over, I had a nice knot in my stomach, and they would always want me to eat faster. They would say, "Every time your brother takes a bite, you take a bite."

David: Oh, my God.

Ina: I'd be like, "Ugh, I just can't."

David: When is the first time you picked up a frying pan in earnest? It wasn't just when you got married later on.

Ina: 100% was when I got married. I was never allowed in the kitchen. My mother never taught me how to do anything. She didn't see any joy in it. She felt that my job was to study, and it was her job to make dinner. I think she wasn't comfortable with me being in the same room with her. She would always say, "You go study." I was in my room my whole childhood, and I think I was pretty lonely. I think that that's why now cooking for Friends and Jeffrey and doing the show, be my guest, where I'm connecting with people is so satisfying.

David: Would you like to cook with people around, not by your lonesome in the kitchen.

Ina: I prefer to cook by myself.

David: You do.

Ina: I do. Cooking is hard for me. I do it a lot, but it's really hard. I just love having the space to concentrate on what I'm doing, so I make sure it comes out well. Cooking's hard. When you go to the butcher and you order a chicken, it's a different size every time. It's a different chicken. Some chickens, they're allowed to add water to it, you have no idea what you're going to get. Just the simplest thing as chicken can become complicated. I do find it hard. I'm not confident that it's going to come out well. I have to say, I'm surprised when it does. Maybe I have high standards.

David: Do you remember the first time you made a dinner in earnest for you and Jeffrey?

Ina: Probably as soon as we got married, because it wasn't like we had the money to go after dinner. When we were engaged, before we got married, I remember going out and buying Craig Claiborne's the New York Times Cookbook and I went to, what was it called? It's a store-like. I think it was called Caldor. I bought entire set of kitchen equipment. I just was really excited about being able to cook. I remember within the first month, I made a challah. I remember thinking, "That's what you're going to start with?" I did. I really love things that challenge me, that I think I can't do and then make them and show myself that I can do them.

David: I get the feeling, and this is far from your first book, you've had many books before this, but Go-To Dinners is a book, in a way made for Ina Garten back then. In other words, these are in some ways the least intimidating recipes you could imagine. You're almost telling the reader, "Darling, I know you think you can't do anything, but even you can do this."

Ina: It actually does come full circle, doesn't it? Because once I've learned how to cook and then of course, I got Mastering the Art of French Cooking, both volumes and worked my way through those. I learned the French techniques from Julia Child. I really believe in simplifying things, but what happened in the pandemic is we were also completely stressed. We didn't know what we could do, what we couldn't do. I was making a recipe every day for Instagram, so people could figure out what to do with those white beans that they had in their pantry.

David: Thousands of white beans.

Ina: Exactly. So many white beans and whatever they had. I was making recipes for my cookbook for this book, and I was cooking lunch and dinner for Jeffrey and me every single day. By sometime around May or June, I was in bed with the covers up over my head. I thought I really need to simplify. It is true that I came full circle, but for a different reason.

David: Now, I've admitted this to you before, but now admitting it to everybody who's listening, to Relax. I don't cook, I watch cooking videos, I watch you, I watch Jacques Pepin, I watch this Szechuan guy who's going 300 miles an hour making incredible food, but I can't cook. Hold my hand and tell me what I need to know. Initially, if I'm having four people over six people, whatever it is, what do I need to know? What do I not need to be nervous about and what would you recommend I start with?

Ina: I think there's one thing everybody should know how to do, which is a roast chicken. I do it in all different forms. I do it with potatoes and fennel. In this book, I have a spring roast chicken or roast chicken with spring vegetables, things like asparagus. You can put almost any vegetable in a roasting pan and a chicken on top of it and put it in the oven. It's the easiest thing in the world. The only thing you have to do is make sure you don't overcook the chicken. People get really nervous.

David: Do you think this is the easiest thing? This is the point of entry.

Ina: Any kind of roast chicken or the chicken in a pot, which is just as easy as can be, you put it in a big pot with chicken stock and vegetables, and then you add saffron to give it a little heat, and then orzo, and you've got a whole dinner all in one pot.

David: Now, I have to ask you, I'm lucky enough to know Jeffrey, but I think for most people who watch you, they see Jeffrey at the end of your show and he'll be saying something like, this is the best soup I've ever had, or this chicken's unbelievable, or something like that. You think to yourself, "He can't possibly be this nice and this brilliant at the same time."

Ina: He's just so appreciative. I think it's one of the reasons why I love to cook. If you cook for somebody who doesn't appreciate it, there's no satisfaction in it. One day, I made him a cup of tea and he said, "Oh, this is the best tea I've ever had." I was like, "Jeffrey, it's a cup of hot water in a tea bag." It was a particularly good tea, but still nothing goes by him. He really appreciates it, which I love.

David: Now, you ran a store, you owned a store from 1978 to 1996, a long time, the Barefoot Contessa. Why did that hit the way it hit out in the Hamptons? It was an incredible success.

Ina: I thought of it as a party. When you walked in the door, I wanted all of your senses engaged. I wanted you to smell something wonderful. I want you to see a wonderful display of produce, or I wanted to hear great music. It was old fashioned, like Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra or whatever was fun to listen to. There were samples of things all over the store so you could taste things, and people would just come in just because it was fun. I thought, "If they're going to come because it's fun, they'll always come when they're hungry." I think that's what worked. It wasn't really about the food. It was about the feeling of being in the store.

David: It seems impossible to imagine, but there was a time, Ina, that you were not as famous as you are now. You started publishing these cookbooks, and you were hesitant about doing a television show. You got offers, I think more than once before you decided to go forward with it. What was your hesitation?

Ina: I didn't think anybody would want to watch me cook on TV actually. Food Network kindly made me an offer, and I kept saying no and they kept coming back, and there was someone there, Eileen Opatut, who just kept saying, "Make me a better offer." I kept saying to her, "No. I just don't want to do this." She just kept coming back. Finally, I had heard about a show that somebody said was a really good cooking show. It was Nigella Lawson's Show. Unbeknownst to me, they went to London, found her producer, told me that they were coming to East Hampton in two weeks. I was like, "Whoa, whoa. I said I wasn't going to do this." Eileen said, "Just do 13 shows thinking how hard could that be." They arrived on my doorstep, and I thought, "Let's see what we can do." One of the things I think about in life is, you have to jump in the pond. You say no to things without really understanding-- Like, I said no to Instagram before I understood what it was. I kept saying no, that TV, I was just like, "I love writing cookbooks. I want to keep doing that. I can't imagine being on TV."

David: It always seemed to me that the most successful ones, there was some character involved. Julia Child was a big character. She had personality traits that we could easily list. Graham Kerr did. All kinds of people who've done it. How do you think about that in terms of the personality you put out there? Because I have to say, being lucky enough to know you, it seems like one and the same person.

Ina: I am the same person you see on TV. I found a coach who would teach me how to be on TV. I have no idea why I knew this, but after one session with her, I thought, "That's just awful." Nothing she said made sense to me. I thought I just need to be myself on TV. It's the only thing that works. I don't know why I knew that. I just knew it.

David: I have to say though, I'm watching you cook and there's a move that you do, all of a sudden a stick and a half of butter goes into the pan and you look up both with mischief in your eyes and a little guiltily and say, "It makes a lot of brownies." Go ahead.

Ina: Do you know what I believe, I think we should eat real food. If it's delicious, surely, it's worth cooking for. My favorite expression is, if you eat low fat diet, it's not that you live longer, it just seems longer. Isn't that true?

David: Now we have some questions sent by email to you. This comes from Julie Wilson and Maureen Tipping in Comber, Northern Ireland. This question is from my neighbor Maureen and me, Julie. We're tuning in from Comber, which is a small village just outside of Belfast. During COVID, our neighborhood came together into a really lovely, supportive and fun community. We went from being neighbors to being friends. This Christmas, we would like to co-host a party for our street. Our village is famous for potatoes, so we're really keen to know if Ina has any ideas on how to transform the humble spud into a delicious party food hors d'oeuvre.

Ina: A potato hors d'oeuvre is an interesting thing.

David: Keep in mind you're giving potato tips to Ireland. That's a tall order.

Ina: Exactly. That's really daunting. You know what I would do, is I'd make potato latkes. I think that would be great.

David: Wow. You have a great recipe for that, I should say.

Ina: I do. What you can do is you can prepare them in advance, put them on a sheet pan and warm them in the oven.

David: Sounds delish.

Ina: Is that a good one?

David: From Alex Lewin in Berkeley, California. Dear Ms. Garten, about 10 years ago, I read a short story in Harper's about which I remember nothing, not the title, the author of the plot, except for a scene in which a character fishes a bay leaf out of a bowl of soup and flicks it away and he tells his dining companion, bay leaves are BS. Ever since then, I've been nagged by the question, are bay leaves BS? Whenever I put them in anything, I can't tell what effect they have. Am I using them wrong? Also, is it true that they should be kept in the freezer?

Ina: I really don't know the answer to this. I will say that I always also wonder whether a bay leaf makes a difference. There are a couple of things that I use bay leaves in. I've always wanted to make them without the bay leaves to see if it made a difference, and I never have. I'm not sure.

David: Can I just say, this is called making news. Ina Garten calls bullshit on bay leaves. Now, these are questions from New Yorker Instagram. What to make for two people while still making it feel like a holiday and a special meal. This is from Teresa Nobry.

Ina: You know what's really great, is roast pork loins, because they're very small and you can marinate them and roast them really simply, serve them with a potato and apple and fennel puree and some shaved Brussels sprouts. It'd be a great holiday meal. It's not like cooking a whole ham.

David: I have a very important question to ask. When did Brussels sprouts go from being as in my childhood disgusting to in--

Ina: I happen to know

David: Into my adulthood, it's like I can't wait to get more Brussels sprouts. What happened?

Ina: What happened was, and I actually started this at the store in the '80s. I started roasting Brussels sprouts instead of boiling them. They were so good because they're crispy and they're more like French fries. They're fantastic. Then I thought, "If you can roast Brussels sprouts, maybe you can roast butternut squash." We started roasting butternut squash and string beans. We roasted everything. The best part is it's the easiest thing in the world. You put whatever vegetable it is on a sheet pan, olive oil, salt and pepper, and into the oven.

David: On asparagus too, you're pro-roasting rather than steaming or boiling.

Ina: 100%. I think it brings out the flavor, it caramelizes the sugars in it, and it's much more delicious.

David: Perfect. Now, this is not exactly a food question. How many scarves do you own? You always have one on, Sue Palmer.

Ina: A lot. I have drawers and drawers of scarves. She's absolutely right. I have them everywhere. I just love having a scarf around my neck. I just think it feels good. David, I was just thinking to myself, can we just do this again tomorrow?

David: I think we can do it all night.

Ina: It's so much fun. Thank you.

David: Ina Garten, thank you so much.

Ina: So much fun to talk to you as always, David.

David: Thank you. I spoke with Ina Garten in 2022. Her recent book is a memoir called Be Ready When the Luck Happens. Be My Guest with Ina Garten on the Food Network is in its 5th season.

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