Ina Garten about her memoirs and a life full of reinventions

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

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s fresh whiskey sours

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

In fact, 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 positions in the White House in the 1970s. But her “after-hours therapy,” as she puts it, was hosting dinner parties for friends. “I just thought this was wrong,” she said. “I love what I do after work, and what I do during the day wasn’t that exciting for me.”

Shortly after her 30th birthday, she was reading the New York Times when she spotted a small ad for a specialty grocery 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.”

They bought the business for $20,000 and took out a second mortgage on their Washington, D.C. home. Jeffrey commuted on weekends while Ina managed the store.

This was particularly surprising because, growing up, Ina was never allowed to leave the beaten path in any way. “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.”

She was born Ina Rosenberg in 1948 and 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 temper tantrums and would physically beat her and even drag her around by her hair. “I think I wanted to defend myself, but I was afraid he was going to kill me,” Garten said.

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

But her life was about to change when she was only 16 years old. While visiting her brother at Dartmouth College, another student named Jeffrey Garten spotted Ina through the library window. When asked what he found so attractive about her, Jeffrey replied: “Everything, absolutely everything. The way she stood, she laughed. And she was just beautiful.”

He made an effort to introduce herself and they married in 1968.

While Jeffrey is sometimes a likeable presence on Ina’s shows, he is also a well-known economist who 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 mother. “Absolutely 100 percent,” she said. “Jeffrey would have been a great parent, just great.”

When asked what he thought about not having children, Jeffrey replied: “I haven’t thought about it that much. I was really busy just getting on with it, so it didn’t bother me.”

Ina threw herself into running the Barefoot Contessa with well-heeled Hamptons customers, including a woman who stopped by every week to buy 10 pounds of grilled lemon chicken. “And after many weeks, I finally had to say, ‘What are you going to do with ten pounds of grilled lemon chicken?'” Garten recalls. “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 separation: “I love cooking dinner, but what I don’t like is is for.” “Someone 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 business 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 huge success. “I’ve somehow developed a connection with home cooks that I couldn’t have imagined,” she said.

Now she has written 12 more. “I think it’s a little bit like sports,” Garten said. “The more you do it, the better you get at it.”

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

And 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 tortured himself as much as he tortured me. And it was so easy and it was so effective, and then we had a good relationship.

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s fresh whiskey sours

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The story was produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Chad Cardin.

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