Actors - Ina Garten

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Ina Garten

	Actors - Ina Garten

Ina Rosenberg Garten (born February 2, 1948) is a chef, former caterer, cookbook author, columnist, and hostess of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa. Renowned for demystifying fine cuisine with an emphasis on quality ingredients and timesaving tips, she has been championed by the likes of Martha Stewart, Eli Zabar, and Patricia Wells as a top authority on cooking and home entertaining.

Garten had little to no formal culinary training, and instead taught herself classic French and New England techniques with the aid of canonical cookbooks and relied on intuition and feedback from customers and friends to refine recipes. She was mentored chiefly by Zabar, of Eli's Manhattan and Eli's Breads fame; and domestic maven Stewart. Among her trademark dishes are cœur à la crème, celery root remoulade, pear clafouti, and a simplified version of bœuf bourguignon.

Her culinary fame began with her gourmet food store, Barefoot Contessa, and Garten parlayed this success into a string of bestselling cookbooks, magazine columns, self-branded convenience foods, and a popular Food Network television show.

Early history and career

Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, Garten was the second of two children born to her surgeon father and homemaker mother. Strongly encouraged to excel in her school career, she showed a particularly strong aptitude for science and often won local science fairs. Garten's mother, an intellectual with an interest in opera, refused her daughter's requests to assist her in the kitchen and instead directed her to concentrate on schoolwork. Garten has described her father as a lively individual with many friends, and has commented that she shares more characteristics with him than with her mother. At 15, she met future husband, Jeffrey Garten, on a trip to visit her brother at Dartmouth College. After a year of exchanging letters, they began dating when Garten turned 16. After high school, she attended Syracuse University with plans to study fashion design, but chose to change her major to economics. However, Garten abandoned her educational pursuits to marry shortly thereafter and did not obtain a degree.

Fort Bragg and Paris

In 1968, after obtaining a portion of her college education and then marrying, Garten relocated with her husband to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she dabbled in cooking and entertaining in an effort to occupy her time while her husband served his four-year military tour. After completing his term, the couple journeyed to Paris, France for a three-month vacation that Garten has described as the birth of her love for French cuisine. It was there that she experienced open-air markets, produce stands, and the quality cooking ingredients that would later become her trademark for the first time. Upon returning to the States, she began to cultivate her culinary prowess by working her way through the volumes of Julia Child's seminal cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Capitol Hill

The couple once again relocated in 1972, this time to Washington D.C, where she worked in the White House and took business courses at George Washington University. Originally employed on the lower rung as a government aide, she climbed the political ladder and was assigned the position of budget analyst, which entailed writing the nuclear energy budget and policy papers on nuclear centrifuge for then-Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Strained by the pressures of her work and the serious, mundane setting of Washington, Garten turned to cooking and entertaining in her free time, constantly arranging dinner parties at her home on the weekends. She also purchased and refurbished two homes in the Dupont Circle and Kalorama areas of Washington, then sold them on the real estate market (a process known as house flipping). The profits from these sales gave Garten adequate funds to make her next purchase, the Barefoot Contessa specialty food emporium.

Barefoot Contessa

Barefoot Contessa store

Garten would abandon government work in 1978 after spotting an ad for a specialty food store in Westhampton Beach called Barefoot Contessa. Garten made a hasty decision to purchase the store after traveling to view it, and moved to New York to assume ownership and management. The store was named by its original owner in tribute to the 1954 film starring Ava Gardner, and Garten would retain the name when she took over, as it meshed well with her idea of an "elegant but earthy" lifestyle. The store became extremely successful, bolstered by Garten's sophisticated but simple dishes, self-branded line of gourmet coffees, and party catering services, along with such employees as Anna Pump, who would later go on to establish the popular Loaves & Fishes bakery and Bridgehampton Inn. Within a year, she had moved Barefoot Contessa across the street from its original location to a larger property; and then, in 1985, Garten relocated the store to the newly-vacated premises of gourmet shop Dean and DeLuca in Long Island's wealthy and exclusive East Hampton village, a year-round community versus Westhampton's summer-season atmosphere.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ina Garten ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Ina Garten; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.